"Gently, gently, my friend; don't let yourself get excited. Besides, I _may_ be all at sea, for all my cocksureness. I don't think I am, but--one never knows. I'll tell you one thing, however: The man with whom Madame Loti eloped had, for the purpose of carrying on the intrigue, enlisted as a student under her husband, and gulled the poor fool by pretending that he wished to learn waxwork making, when his one desire was to make love to the man's worthless wife. When they eloped, and Loti knew for the first time what a dupe he had been, he publicly swore, in the open room of the Café Royal, that he would never rest until he had run that man down and had exterminated him and every living creature in whose veins his blood flowed. The man was an English actor, Mr. Narkom. He posed under the _nom de théâtre_ of Jason Monteith--his real name was James Colliver! Step livelier, please--we're dawdling!" CHAPTER XXXVI They that climb the highest have the farthest to fall. It was after five o'clock when the limousine arrived at the premises of Trent & Son, and Cleek, guided by the junior member of the firm and accompanied by Superintendent Narkom, climbed the steep stairs to the housetop and was shown into the glass-room. His first impression, as the door swung inward, was of a scent of flowers so heavy as to be oppressive; his second, of entering into a light so brilliant that it seemed a very glare of gold, for the low-dropped sun, which yellowed all the sky, flooded the place with a radiance which made him blink, and it was some little time before his eyes could accustom themselves to it sufficient to let him discover that the old Italian waxworker was there, busy on his latest tableau. Cleek blinked and looked at the old man, serenely at first, then blinked and looked again, conscious of an overwhelming sense of amazement and defeat for just one fraction of a minute, and that some of his cocksure theories regarding the case had suddenly been knocked into a cocked hat. No wonder Mr. Harrison Trent had spoken of deterioration in the art of this once celebrated modeller. No wonder! The man was not Giuseppe Loti at all!--not that world-famed worker in wax who had sworn in those bitter other days to have the life of the vanished James Colliver. CHAPTER XXXVII