Of the many problems upon which Malcolm Sage was engaged during the early days of the Malcolm Sage Bureau, that concerning the death of Professor James McMurray, the eminent physiologist, was perhaps the most extraordinary. It was possessed of several remarkable features; for one thing the murderer had disappeared, leaving no clue; for another the body when found seemed to have undergone a strange change, many of the professor's sixty-five years appearing to have dropped from him in death as leaves from an autumn tree. It was one of those strange crimes for which there is no apparent explanation, consequently the strongest weapon the investigator has, that of motive, was absent. As far as could be gathered the dead professor had not an enemy in the world. He was a semi-recluse, with nothing about him to tempt the burglar; yet he had been brutally done to death in his own laboratory, and the murderer had made good his escape without leaving anything likely to prove helpful to the police. One day as Gladys Norman, like "panting Time," toiled after her work in vain, striving to tap herself up to date with an accumulation of correspondence, the telephone-bell rang for what seemed to her the umpteenth time that morning. She seized the receiver as a dog seizes a rat, listened, murmured a few words in reply, then banged it back upon its rest. "Oh dear!" she sighed. "I wish they'd let him alone. The poor dear looks tired out." She turned to William Johnson, who had just entered. "Why don't you hurry up and become a man, Innocent," she demanded, "so that you can help the Chief?" William Johnson looked vague and shuffled his feet. His admiration of Malcolm Sage's secretary rendered him self-conscious in her presence. "Sir John Dene and Sir Jasper Chambers to see the Chief," he announced, obviously impressed by the social importance of the callers. "Sure it's not the Shah of Persia and Charlie Chaplin?" she asked wearily as she rose from her table and, walking over to the door marked "Private," passed into Malcolm Sage's room. Reappearing a moment later she instructed William Johnson to show the visitors in at once. As the two men passed through Miss Norman's room, they formed a striking contrast, Sir John Dene short, thick-set, alert, with the stamp of the West-End upon all he wore; Sir Jasper Chambers tall, gaunt arid dingy, with a forehead like the bulging eaves of an Elizabethan house, and the lower portion of his face a riot of short grizzled grey hair that seemed to know neither coercion nor restraint. His neck appeared intent on thrusting itself as far as possible out of the shabby frock-coat that hung despairingly from his narrow shoulders. "I wonder," murmured Gladys Norman, as she returned to her typing, "how many geraniums he had to give for those clothes." "Morning, Mr. Sage," cried Sir John Dene. Malcolm Sage rose. There was an unwonted cordiality in the way in which he extended his hand.