Freyberger turned the corner, walked a hundred yards down Malpas Road and then came back. Hellier was not in sight. The detective waited for a moment or two to make sure, and then approached No. 18. He entered the gate, closed it behind him, and made for the back garden. Here he stood for a moment, looking about him with eager eyes. Then he began searching about on the ground attentively, as a person searches who has dropped a coin. There was a fairish sized grass plot, on which the grass was rank and long. A gravelled walk lay round it, and a flowerless flower bed between the walk and the garden wall. There was no sign of a bootmark anywhere, though the ground was soft and there had been no frost on the previous night. The gravel was disturbed on the walk leading to the verandah, but that was nothing. In that portion of the garden where digging was possible there was no sign. Yet the hoe had been used quite recently, and a sure instinct told him that it had not been used in the front garden, where observation was possible, but here, in this place that was overlooked by nothing but blind walls and the back windows of an empty house. Suddenly his eye was struck by an object upon the flower bed by the rear wall. A half-withered cabbage leaf. There were withered leaves and to spare in the garden, but this was the only cabbage leaf. Nothing looked more natural or in keeping with the general untidiness of the place. A thousand men hunting for traces would have disregarded it. Freyberger walked towards it and picked it up. The bit of ground it had covered had been disturbed. In a moment, digging with his naked hand, he had unearthed a flat, morocco leather-covered box. He opened it, it was a jewel case and empty. Upon the silk lining of the cover was the name and address: “Smith and Wilkinson, Regent Street.” Smith and Wilkinson, Sir Anthony Gyde’s jewellers. He unearthed another box, and yet another. The sweat stood out in beads upon his forehead. There was something in the Gyde case that affected him as he had never been affected before. Perhaps it was some effluence from the obscure and diabolical mind with which he felt himself at war; perhaps it was the extraordinary intricacies of the pursuit, and the foreknowledge that the creature against whom he had pitted himself was at once a demon, a genius and a madman. Perhaps it was on account of all these reasons that, when he unearthed these recent traces, his soul turned in him and a furious hunger and hatred filled his heart. The hound hates the thing he is pursuing. The lion hates the buck. All hunting is an act of vengeance; not for food alone does the pursuer chase the pursued, but from some old antipathy begotten when the world was young. At times Freyberger, in his unravelling of the Gyde case, was seized by an overmastering desire to have his hands upon the creature he was pursuing and to drag him to his death.