“You haven’t improved my chances by waiting a week before sending for me. However, I’ll do my best, of course. Needless to say, I’ve read the newspaper accounts of the case, but I should be glad to hear your version of the affair.” “If you’ve read the newspapers,” replied Massey, “I don’t suppose I can tell you anything that will be very new. We’d been to the opera--my wife and daughters and myself--and, in the ordinary course of events, we should have returned about half past twelve. Owing to engine troubles and a blow-out, however, it was just after two when we got here. “We were all rather tired,” he continued, “and we decided to go straight to bed. Before my wife and daughters retired, however, they handed me their jewels. I placed the latter in their proper cases, brought them to this room, and locked them in that safe.” He pointed to the mutilated safe in the corner. It was empty now, but was otherwise in the same condition as when the burglars had left it. “After I’d locked up the jewels,” Massey resumed, “I switched off the lights and went to bed. For some reason or other I could not get to sleep at once, and when I’d been in bed about half an hour I thought I heard somebody moving in the study. I got up quietly, put on a dressing gown and slippers, armed myself with a revolver, and stole downstairs. “When I’d crept up to the door here,” he went on, “I distinctly heard men at work in the room. I waited for a few seconds, and then I suddenly flung the door open and sprang in, switching on the lights as I did so. One glance showed me that the safe had been forced and the jewels removed. Two men were about to stow the cases in a leather bag, and two others were packing up the apparatus with which they had opened the safe.” “All the four men wore masks, I understand,” Nick put in. “That’s true.” “So you never saw their faces?” “Unfortunately I did not. From the cut of their clothes, however, and the appearance of their hands, I judged them to be men of a much superior type to the common housebreaker. Their hands were as white as my own, and their clothes were as good as those I’m wearing at this moment.” “That’s interesting. Now, tell me what you did.” Massey described how he had covered the men with his revolver, and had ordered them to raise their hands and stand with their backs to the wall. “They obeyed without a word,” he said. “I thought I’d cowed them, and that I only had to ring for help in order to make my capture complete. But evidently they had posted a fifth man outside the window, to keep watch, and just as I was about to ring the bell--this bell on the desk--the scoundrel fired at me through the window and broke my wrist.” “Did you ever see the fifth man?” “No, I should never have known of his existence had he not fired. It was very clever on their part to leave him out there.” “I see. What happened next?”