Frank Littimer stood there looking round him for some little time. On a table by the bedside stood a photograph of a girl in a silver frame. Littimer pounced upon it hungrily. It was a good picture--the best of Christiana's that he had ever seen. He slipped out into the corridor and gently closed the door behind him. Then he passed along with his whole gaze fixed on the portrait. The girl seemed to be smiling out of the frame at him. He had loved Christiana since she was a child; he felt that he had never loved her so much as at this moment. Well, he had something to remember her by--he had not come here in vain. It seemed impossible yet to realise that Christiana was dead, that he would never look into her sunny, tender face again. No, he would wake up presently and find it had all been a dream. And how different to the last time he was here. He had been smuggled into the house, and he had occupied the room with the oak door. He-- The room with the oak door opened and a big man with a white bandage round his throat stood there with tottering limbs and an ugly smile on his loose mouth. Littimer started back. "Reginald," he exclaimed, "I didn't expect to see you here, or--" "Or you would never have dared to come?" Henson said, hoarsely. "I heard your voice and I was bound to give you a welcome, even at considerable personal inconvenience. Help me back to bed again. And now, you insolent young dog, how dare you show your face here?" "I came to see Chris," Littimer said, doggedly. "And I came too late. Even if I had known that I was going to meet you, I should have been here all the same. Oh, I know what you are going to say; I know what you think. And some day I shall break out and defy you to do your worst." Henson smiled as one might do at the outbreak of an angry child. His eyes flashed and his tongue spoke words that Littimer fairly cowed before. And yet he did not show it. He was like a boy who has found a stone for the man who stands over him with the whip. With quick intuition Henson saw this, and in a measure his manner changed. "You will say next that you are not afraid of me," he suggested. "Well," Littimer replied, slowly; "I am not so much afraid of you as I was." "Ah! so you imagine that you have discovered something?" Littimer apparently struggled between a prudent desire for silence and a disposition to speak. The sneer on the face of his enemy fairly maddened him. "Yes," he said, with a note of elation in his voice, "I have made a discovery, but I am not going to tell you how or where my discovery is. But I've found Van Sneck." A shade of whiter pallor came over Henson's face. Then his eyes took on a murderous, purple-black gleam. All the same, his voice was quite steady as he replied. "I'm afraid that is not likely to benefit you much," he said. "Would you mind handing me that oblong black book from the dressing-table? I want you to do something for me. What's that?"