“While I was trying to make out something in the dense gloom, a door of the house opened, the dim light showing through it from inside, and the form of a man—which must have been Jamie—could be seen passing in, the door closing quickly after him. That’s all there was to it. I told you the rest. Got the name of the street when I went back to the corner.” “Taxi there all right?” “Yes—but I didn’t see it at first. Chauffeur had backed up into some private grounds so the other driver, rattling by toward the city, wouldn’t see him. “‘I don’t know what your man that you’re trailin’ amounts to,’ he said as I got in, ‘but that ain’t no amateur what run him out here!’” “Strikes me you picked a pretty good one yourself,” observed Dudley. “I sure did,” I agreed; “and his parting words put the flag on it. When I’d paid him off at the hotel he stood looking at me with a queer twist to his face and then gave a quick glance about. ‘Say, cap,’ he said, moving quite close, ‘I don’t know as it’s any use to ye, but we was shadowed too.’ And he was gone before I could——” I stopped in the midst of what I was saying. The man who’d been sitting behind Duds—the one who’d started slightly when I mentioned the name Torringtown—was standing beside our table. I hadn’t noticed him come up. “Pardon this intrusion, gentlemen,” the stranger said in a low voice and with a most courteous inflection, “but it was impossible to avoid overhearing what you were saying. I should hardly have thought it wise to trouble you with an apology for this, but it occurred to me that the very remarkable coincidence involved might possibly be of some slight interest.” We’d both risen as he began to speak, and now assured him that the apology was unnecessary and that the coincidence would interest us in the extreme, and begged him to be seated. But he shook his head in a manner to convey that what he had to say would only take a moment. On the first glance the man wasn’t remarkable in any way that I could see: medium height—medium weight—medium age—no particular expression to his face. But in an instant it was different, for he’d hardly begun to speak before I felt—and so did Dudley as he told me afterward—that a person of powerful or compelling character stood before us. Powerful in some peculiar way. I never took much stock in hypnotism and don’t now; at the same time I can see how things like that, carried a bit further, might put a man where he couldn’t see straight. These things occurred to me afterward—I couldn’t have got away, at the time, from what the fellow was talking about. He went on at once, after declining our invitation to sit down: “A few moments ago I heard, from the direction of your table, the name of a street which is intimately associated with an affair I’ve been investigating for nearly two years.” Something made me murmur, without the slightest intention of doing so, “Torringtown Road.”