So escaped Snooper Brome, with three car-loads of detectives all but on his heels and four hundred thousand pounds' worth of gems in a shabby leather bag. And the armed men who prowled the streets of London searched in vain. That evening, Oscar Raegenssen summoned his portly butler and his chauffeur to his study. He took the cocktail the butler shook for him, and threw two buff scraps of paper on the table. "To-night," he ordered, "you will go to der theadrigal enderdainments. Your tiggets! I do not wiss to disturbed pe!" His servants accepted the tickets with murmured thanks, and exchanged a covert wink, for they were used to their master's eccentricities. Without warning or explanation he would disappear for weeks, and return, as though he had only been absent for a day, expecting to find everything running smoothly for him to drop back into. Often he sent them away for the night, with some such instructions as he gave them now. They put their own constructions on these habits of his, and they were quite wrong. Raegenssen saw them out of the house, and then fetched a hat and stick and himself left. He dined economically at a small restaurant in Soho, and from there he went on to the Orpheum Theatre, where that bright entertainment _Bronx or Manhattan_ played nightly to crowded houses. Not that Oscar Raegenssen was interested in snappy back-chat, negroid music, or chorus girls' legs; but the box of a theatre is a convenient place for meeting those whom you wish to see and speak with in private. There Storm, who was in the stalls, saw him dozing boredly during the first part of the show, for Oscar Raegenssen's friend was not due to arrive until ten. Storm left in the interval, and strolled leisurely to the garage where his car was kept. He drove north and west--along Oxford Street and up Orchard Street, and when the gates of Regent's Park loomed before him he veered half left and went on up the Finchley Road. After a distance he turned right, drove on for about three hundred yards, and suddenly swung left into an unlighted track. The car bumped and jolted as he nursed it over the uneven ground. At length he stopped, switched off all his lights, got down, and stretched himself. The moon was new and feeble, and the sky black with hurrying clouds. Somewhere to the north rumbled the mutter of distant thunder, A summer storm was brewing. He disappeared among the shadows. The darkness was almost complete, yet he picked his way over the rough path unerringly. On either side of him rose ghostly polyliths which resembled ruins in that faint light, and once he climbed over a wall in the interstices of which the cement was still soft. He was on a plot of land where a block of flats was being erected.