It is one of the laws of mind that the ferocity of the pursuer increases at each double and shift of the pursued. Carefully searching with his hands in the soft earth and finding nothing else, Freyberger smoothed the soil, replaced the cabbage leaf and carefully effaced his traces on the gravel of the walk. Then, with the jewel cases in the pocket of his overcoat, he approached the house. He examined the lock of the verandah door. The affair was so shaky that he could have burst it in with a kick, but violence was the last thing to be used. He drew from his pocket what the thieves of Madrid term a “matadore”; what the Apachés of Paris term a “nightingale”; what an honest man might call a piece of thick wire about a foot long, but of such material as to be fairly easily bent or straightened without danger of fracture. He bent one end of this piece of wire and introduced it into the lock, just as a surgeon introduces a probe into a sinus. Having explored the mechanism, he drew out the wire, rebent it, introduced it, and with a turn of his wrist opened the door. Then he carefully pushed the bolt of the lock back, entered and pulled the door to. There was nothing in the verandah, with the exception of the flower-pots, the hoe, and an old watering pot that had lost its rose. The door leading into the house gave upon a passage floored with linoleum. On the right lay a room entirely destitute of furniture, on the left a sitting-room decently furnished, with the embers of a fire still smouldering in the grate. The remains of some food lay upon the table in the middle of the room, also upon the table a copy of _The Daily Telegraph_ of that day. This, then, was the den of the beast, the home of the demon. Nothing at all pointed to the fact. It was just the sitting-room of a man in somewhat reduced circumstances, an honest man, or a rogue, as the case might be. There was a tobacco jar on the mantelpiece, and in it tobacco and a bundle of cigarette papers; a pair of old slippers stood beside the armchair on the right of the fireplace. A pile of newspapers stood in one corner of the room, and in another lay an old valise. Freyberger opened the valise. There was a suit of clothes in it, nothing else—a frock coat and waistcoat and a pair of trousers. They were evidently the production of a first class tailor, though the little squares of glazed linen, bearing the customer’s name, which all good London tailors affix to their productions, both under the collar of the coat and inside the strap of the waistcoat, had been removed. Freyberger returned the things to the valise and replaced it in the corner, then he began a minute inspection of the room.