Next afternoon Shuttleworth called upon me in Wilton Street, and for a long time sat chatting. At last he looked at me gravely, and said-- "I dare say you have been much puzzled, Mr. Biddulph, to know why I, a clergyman of the Church of England, have apparently been mixed up with persons of shady character. But now that four of them are under arrest, and a fifth, we hope, will shortly be apprehended, I will explain. As you perhaps know, Sonia was the daughter of the Honourable Philip Poland, who came to live at the Elms, which is close to the rectory at Middleton. We became great friends, until one evening he made a strange confession to me. He told me who he was--Louis Lessar, who had been the leader of a dangerous band of international thieves--and he asked my advice in my capacity of spiritual guide. He had repented, and had gone into retirement there, believing that his sins would not find him out. But they had done, and he knew he must shortly be arrested. Well, I advised him to act the man, and put aside the thoughts of suicide. What he had revealed to me had--I regret to confess it--aroused my hatred against the man who had betrayed him--a man named Du Cane. This man Du Cane I had only met once, at the Elms, and then I did not realize the amazing truth--that this was the selfsame man who had stolen from me, twenty years before, the woman I had so dearly loved. He had betrayed her, and left her to starve and die in a back street in Marseilles. I concealed my outburst of feeling, yet the very next evening Poland was arrested, and Sonia, ignorant of the truth, was, with a motive already explained by Monsieur Guertin, taken under the guardianship of this man whom I had such just cause to hate--the man who subsequently passed as her father, Pennington. It was because of that I felt all along such a tender interest in the unhappy young lady, and I was so delighted to know when she had at last become your wife." "You certainly concealed your feelings towards Pennington. I believed you to be his friend," I said. "I was Sonia's friend--not his, for what poor Poland had told me revealed the truth that the fellow was an absolute scoundrel." "And you, of course, know about the incident of a man closely resembling the French detective Guertin being found dead outside the door of the Elms?" "Certainly," was his reply; "that is still a complete mystery which can only be solved by Poland himself. He must know, or else have a shrewd idea of what occurred." As we chatted on for a long time, he told me frankly many things of which I had not the least suspicion, at the same time assuring me of Sonia's deep devotion towards me, and of his confidence that she had left me because she believed being at her father's side would ensure my own safety. And now that I knew so much of the truth I longed hourly to meet her, and to obtain from her--and perhaps from the lips of Philip Poland himself--the remaining links in that remarkable chain of facts.