On the Friday following the assassination of the Prime Minister, and the day before the funeral, according to custom I took a constitutional in the Park before going down to my office. As a matter of fact I was somewhat earlier than usual, and for that reason, with the exception of a few riders in the Row, and the customary bicycle contingent, the Park was comparatively empty. I entered by the Grosvenor Gate, walked as far as the Barracks, and then retraced my steps towards Piccadilly, passing along the north bank of the Serpentine. I had several difficult problems to work out that day, and one of them was occupying my mind as I walked beside the lake. Suddenly a voice I recognised fell upon my ear, and I looked up to find, seated a few paces distant from me, no less a person than the Countess de Venetza. She was engaged in an earnest conversation with a dark, foreign-looking individual, an Italian, without the shadow of a doubt. The Countess did not see me at first, but, as soon as she did, she said something hurriedly to the man beside her and came forward to greet me. "You are out early, Sir George," she began. "The Park is delightful at this time of the day, is it not?" "Delightful indeed," I replied. "I did not expect, however, to have the pleasure of meeting you in it." "I walk here almost every morning," she answered. And then, after we had uttered a few commonplaces, she continued: "And now, while I think of it, let me apologize to you for my rudeness in having omitted to thank you again for the great service you rendered us on the occasion of the burglary at Wiltshire House. Had it not been for your prompt action, we should have been more seriously robbed, while it is quite possible that something worse might have happened." "You say that you might have been '_more seriously robbed'?_" I returned. "Am I to understand, then, that the man was found in the house after all?" "He was not found _in the house_," she replied. "But we have discovered by what means he effected his escape from it. While Conrad and the police were looking for him downstairs, he was hidden in a dressing-room adjoining that which used to be my father's apartment, at the back of the house. When they ascended the stairs he opened the window and lowered himself down to a roof below. Then he must have made his way through the mews at the back and reached safety again. In proof of this a small silver ornament, one of the few missing things, was found next day in the guttering of the roof." If this were so, then the detective's statement to the effect that the man who had entered the house was none other than young Reiffenburg was altogether beyond the mark, and would only serve to show the folly of judging by purely circumstantial evidence. "In that case, who do you suspect of having admitted him to the house?" I enquired, for this was a point of considerable importance.