"The charge with which I am immediately concerned," replied the detective, "and on account of which an extradition warrant has been issued, is the forgery of a client's name by the solicitor Henry Carew. In the meanwhile, look at these," and he threw on the table two photographs. Carew took them up. One, he saw, was a portrait of Arthur Allen, his friend whom he left to drown in the North Sea; the other was a photograph of himself which had been taken eight years back, when he was another man, when his conscience was still clear, and before his gambling losses had driven him from crime to crime; sin and suffering had yet drawn no lines on the face, the brow was free from care. He gazed gloomily at this presentment of what he had been and could never be again, and his mind wandered back with despairing regret to memories of guiltless days. "On the 15th of August last," continued the detective, "a solicitor, Henry Carew, absconded, disappeared, leaving no trace. For some time I, who was entrusted with the case, was altogether at fault; but at last, as often happens, a coincidence threw me on the scent. I came across an advertisement inserted in the papers by the relatives of a missing man, Arthur Allen. He had left his chambers on the 15th of August, and had not since been heard of. Carew and Allen thus disappeared from London on the same day, mark you; but there was no very remarkable coincidence in that fact. However, I happened to remember that, while searching the papers of Carew to discover what were his habits, who were his acquaintances, and so forth, I had come across the name of this Arthur Allen, apparently a friend of Carew's. The clue was worth following up. I soon ascertained that Allen had that day sailed from the Thames in his yacht; that his last known port of call was Rotterdam. I went to Rotterdam, and there, from a Mr. Hoogendyk and others, learnt that the man who called himself Arthur Allen had conducted himself in a somewhat curious manner for an English yachtsman, and had suddenly sailed from that port, bound no one knew whither, with a crew of Spanish desperadoes." The detective now took the two photographs from the hand of Carew, who was still gazing at them in a dazed way, apparently not listening to the words of his accuser.