Then, swallowing his coffee, he wished Hugh, “buon viaggio” and was about to depart, when Hugh said: 

“Look here.  Is it quite impossible for you to give me any inkling concerning this astounding affair?  I know that some unknown friend, or friends, are looking after my welfare.  But why?  To whom am I indebted for all this?  Who has warned Miss Ranscomb and told her of my alias and my journey to Brussels?”

“A friend of hers and of yourself,” was the chauffeur’s reply.  “No, please do not question me, signore,” he added.  “I have done my best for you.  And now my journey is at an end, while yours is only beginning.  Pardon me—­but you have money with you, I suppose?  If you have not, these good people here will trust you.”

“But what is this house?”

The man laughed.  Then he said: 

“Well, really it is a bolt-hole used by those who wish to evade our very astute police.  If one conforms to the rules of Signora Ravecca and her husband, then one is quite safe and most comfortable.”

Hugh realized that he was in a hiding-place used by thieves.  A little later he knew that the ugly old woman’s husband paid toll to a certain delegato of police, hence their house was never searched.  While the criminal was in those shabby rooms he was immune from arrest.  The place was, indeed, one of many hundreds scattered over Europe, asylums known to the international thief as places ever open so long as they can pay for their board and lodging and their contribution towards the police bribes.

A few moments later the ugly, uncouth man who had brought him from Monte Carlo lit a cigarette, and wishing the old woman a merry “addio” left and descended the stairs.

The signora then showed Hugh to his room, a small, dispiriting and not overclean little chamber which looked out upon the backs of the adjoining houses, all of which were high and inartistic.  Above, however, was a narrow strip of brilliantly blue sunlit sky.

A quarter of an hour later he made the acquaintance of the woman’s husband, a brown-faced, sinister-looking individual whose black bushy eyebrows met, and who greeted the young Englishman familiarly in atrocious French, offering him a glass of red wine from a big rush-covered flask.

“We only had word of your coming late last night,” the man said.  “You had already started from Monte Carlo, and we wondered if you would get past the frontier all right.”

“Yes,” replied Hugh, sipping the wine out of courtesy.  “We got out of France quite safely.  But tell me, who made all these arrangements for me?”

“Why, Il Passero, of course,” replied the man, whose wife addressed him affectionately as Beppo.

“Who is Il Passero, pray?”

“Well, you know him surely.  Il Passero, or The Sparrow.  We call him so because he is always flitting about Europe, and always elusive.”

“The police want him, I suppose.”