To his great satisfaction, Harold saw his dusky friend not only in bed, but fast asleep before he had finished his own change. Everything seemed to promise fair for the morrow. It was past two, and Harold hurried along in the direction of Harley Street, and he was glad to see a gleam over the fanlight of the surgeon’s front door. He was pulling the bell for the second time when Sir James Brownsmith appeared. "What do you want?" he asked, testily. "A consulting physician like myself——" "How is Mrs. Benstein?" Harold asked coolly. The question was quite effective. "When I saw you a little time ago, Sir James, I passed as one of the Shan’s suite. Clothed and in my right mind, I am Mr. Harold Denvers, at your service. I have the solution of the Manfred mystery in my pocket." "And altogether I have no doubt that you are a most remarkable young man," Sir James said. "Pray come in. I ought to be in bed, but I have not the faintest inclination for sleep. Come in." Brilliant lights gleamed in Brownsmith’s cosy study, where books and scientific instruments made up the bulk of the furniture. The famous surgeon proffered cigarettes what time he looked keenly into the face of his younger companion. He lighted one of the thin paper tubes himself. "I am just from Mrs. Benstein’s house," he explained. "I saw her alone, her husband knows nothing; it is her great desire that he should know nothing, that the matter should be kept a profound secret, in fact." "It must be," Harold exclaimed. "Not a word of it must leak out. You made a certain examination of the wound. What did you find? Was there any blood?" "I’m not quite sure. When I came to wash the arm there was no blood there. But there were the fibres of the rope, and they seemed to be impregnated with blood the same as those from the throat of Manfred, and the body of that poor fellow who was strangled at Streatham." "Are you quite sure that it is blood, Sir James?" "Well, I could hazard the suggestion, though I have not made a careful analysis yet. No blood on the victim, but blood on the strands of the rope. Strange, isn’t it?" "If it were true, yes," Harold said, dryly. "But it isn’t. Look here, Sir James." From the vest-pocket of his dress-clothes Harold took one wilted bloom of the Cardinal Moth. He crushed it between his fingers, and immediately they were covered with a rosy sticky bright red substance exactly like blood. No paint or pigment of any kind could have counterfeited the original so well. "Well, that’s interesting," Sir James cried. "I see your meaning. When the victim was strangled one or two of those amazing blooms must have been twisted round the rope." "In other words, the rope that did the mischief was the rope that held up the Cardinal Moth," Harold said. "It was the same at Streatham; it was the same with poor Manfred; according to your own showing, Mrs. Benstein met with her accident under precisely similar circumstances."