“Well?” Sabatini said.  “You left.  You didn’t come straight here?”

Arnold shook his head.

“When I got into the road, I could see that there was a policeman on duty on the other side of the way, and quite a number of people moving backwards and forwards all the time.  It seemed impossible that they could have brought him out there if he had been fetched away.  Something made me remember what I had noticed on the evening I had dined there—­that there was a small empty house next door.  I walked back up the drive of Pelham Lodge, turned into the shrubbery, and there I found that there was an easy way into the next garden.  I made my way to the back of the house.  I saw lights in the kitchen.  There were three of his companions there, and the dead man.  They were trying to see if they could revive him.  I looked through a chink in the boarded window and I saw everything.”

“Trying to revive him,” Sabatini remarked.  “Evidently there was some doubt as to his being dead, then.”

“I think they had come to the conclusion that he was dead,” Arnold replied; “for after a time they put on his overcoat and dragged him out by the back entrance, down some mews, into another street.  I followed them at a distance.  They hailed a taxi.  One man got in with him and drove away, the others disappeared.  I came here.”

Sabatini reached out his hand for a cigarette.

“I have seldom,” he declared, “listened to a more interesting episode.  You didn’t happen to hear the direction given to the driver of the taxicab?”

“I did not.”

“You have no idea, I suppose,” Sabatini asked, with a sudden keen glance, “as to the identity of the man whom you believe to be dead?”

“None whatever,” Arnold replied, “except that it was the same man who was watching the house on the night when I dined there.  He told me then that he wanted Rosario.  There was something evil in his face when he mentioned the name.  I saw his hand grasping the window-sill.  He was wearing a ring—­a signet ring with a blood-red stone.”

“This is most engrossing,” Sabatini murmured.  “A signet ring with a blood-red stone!  Wasn’t there a ring answering to that description upon the finger of the man who stabbed Rosario?”

“There was,” Arnold answered.

Sabatini knocked the ash from his cigarette.

“The coincidence,” he remarked, “if it is a coincidence, is a little extraordinary.  By the bye, though, you have as yet given me no explanation as to your visit here.  Why do you connect me with this adventure of yours?”

“I do not connect you with it at all,” Arnold answered; “yet, for some reason or other, I am sure that your sister knew more about this man and his presence in her sitting-room than she cared to confess.  When I left there, everything was in confusion.  I have come to tell you the final result, so far as I know it.  You will tell her what you choose.  What she knows, I suppose you know.  I don’t ask for your confidence.  I have had enough of these horrors.  Tooley Street is bad enough, but I think I would rather sit in my office and add up figures all day long, than go through another such night.”