"Well, to cut a long story short, I was very little wiser at the end of my search than I was at the beginning. I found practically nothing, except a few receipted bills and one or two business letters which dealt entirely with money matters. If he had any private papers he had evidently put them away somewhere or other in safe custody before leaving London. "Under the circumstances I acted as best I could. I stayed there until the funeral was over, and then I locked up everything and left Bascomb in charge, with instructions that he wasn't to allow anyone in the house without a written permission from me. He's a queer, sullen sort of fellow, but he seemed to have plenty of sense in his way, and, as far as I could make out, to be thoroughly loyal and trustworthy. "When I got back to London my first step was to go and see your uncle's bankers. I explained the position to them, and I found them quite ready to give me all the assistance in their power. This didn't amount to much, however. They had no private documents or anything of that sort; in fact, all they could really do was to let me have a complete statement of the actual cash and securities in their possession. "I saw then that the only practical course was to get into communication with you as soon as possible. It was a bit of a proposition, considering that I knew nothing whatever about you except your name, but luckily I was able to secure the services of a retired Scotland Yard Inspector called Martin Campbell, who is quite the smartest man in London at that sort of thing. (He is coming here this morning, by the way, so you will probably meet him.) Well, he set to work, and in something less than three weeks he had managed to run you to earth--or perhaps I should say to sea! Anyhow, he found out that you were second officer on the _Neptune_, and as the Planet people told us that your ship was expected in Oporto on the third of May, I decided to wait and cable you there. "Meanwhile I went ahead with the business of establishing your claim to the estate. It was plain enough sailing now I had once got on to your track, and by the time you reached Oporto all the preliminary steps were more or less completed. Of course, there are still a number of legal formalities to be gone through. You won't be able to touch the money in the bank for some little while, but that is a difficulty we can probably come to some arrangement over. If you are short of cash I have no objection to making you a personal advance. As far as the actual title to the property is concerned, you can take it from me that your position is a perfectly sound one." He tossed the bundle of papers he had been holding on to the table, and leaned back in his chair with an air of reassuring friendliness. "It seems to me," I said gratefully, "that I'm pretty deeply in your debt already. I don't know why you should have taken all this trouble on my account, but I'm sure I'm devilish obliged to you."