He read foreign newspapers and made notes of criminal cases that interested him. He had done this for some ten years, and in his shabby lodgings there were a series of notebooks containing the details of very curious crimes. He knew as much about the poisoners, Palmer and Smethurst, as though he had attended their trials, and from the Brinvilliers case to the case of Monk Léothade, to the case of François Lesnier, French criminal history was an open book to him. The clocks were striking six when he arrived at his lodgings in Fox Street, S.E. He occupied a sitting-room and bedroom on the first floor. The walls of the sitting-room were lined with books. It was a curious library. Any general information you wanted you could find here, and a whole lot of information by no means general. Amidst a host of books dealing with all sorts of facts you might have found Schiller, and a first edition of Heine’s lyrics stood upon a shelf above the last edition of _Casper’s Forensic Medicine_. Tea things were laid upon the table and a bright fire was burning upon the hearth and it was an indication of the man’s nature, that, burning as he was to be at his notes, he first had tea and fortified the inner man with a meal that the inner man was badly in need of. The notebooks, large volumes filled with press cuttings, were on a lower shelf. He took a small ledger, looked up the letter L, found the following entry: “Lefarge case, book B, page 115.” Then he placed book B upon the table, opened it at page 115 and, drawing up a chair, plunged into details. He just scanned the columns of printed matter over first for names before going through the case in detail. His heart bounded when he came upon the name, “Müller,” and again upon the name Müller, and again and again. Müller had a lot to do with the business dealt with by all these columns of printed matter. That business was what is known in the annals of crime as the Lefarge case; and it had occurred eight years previously in Paris, and the details are as follows: M. Lefarge, it appears, had owned a shop in the Rue de la Paix. He was a jeweller and very wealthy. He was also a widower, and his family consisted of one daughter, Cécile, whom we saw in the first pages of this story, and who, at the time of the Lefarge tragedy, was just sixteen years of age. It appears that Lefarge had many friends south of the Seine; he was well known in the Latin quarter as a patron of art and a merry companion when the fit took him, and altogether as a good sort. He did not make these excursions into the Quartier Latin entirely for pleasure; he was a Norman, and had, even when engaged in the business of pleasure, an eye to business.