Nevertheless, something fresh had been discovered by one of the most enterprising of the younger papers--the _Daily Graphic_--which, unlike its contemporaries, did not reprint the old story about a man unknown being found stabbed to the heart in the colonel's bed, but boldly ventured forth into big type with this extraordinary statement: THE MYSTERY AT WHITEHALL IDENTITY OF THE DEAD MAN STORY OF A SECRET VENGEANCE "The man who was found murdered in Colonel Napier's flat in Embankment Mansions has been identified by an official of the Foreign Office from a description and photograph that were hurriedly circulated by Scotland Yard last night. The victim is no other than a gentleman occupying a responsible position in the Treaty Department of the Foreign Office, and the papers found in his desk tend to show that the crime was the work of some secret society which has its headquarters in London, and which had decreed his end because he, as a member, was supposed to have communicated some of its secrets to Lord Cyril Cuthbertson, the Secretary for Foreign Affairs. How he came to be in Colonel Napier's flat--and bed--remains, however, to be explained. He certainly bears an extraordinary resemblance to the missing colonel." By this time the day had begun to close in. The sun had sunk, leaving, as it sometimes does, even in the height of an English summer, the sky grey with mystery and suggestion of on-coming disaster. The paper itself slipped from my fingers as I dropped back into my seat and let my eyes wander over the landscape that, all of a sudden, seemed to have taken on itself the colour of my own thoughts, which were now troubled and perplexed with a dozen doubts and emotions which ever evaded me but none the less filled me with unrest and pain. With an effort I recovered myself and looked curiously at Jose Casteno. He had curled himself up in an attitude that struck me as being too strained and unnatural to be comfortable, but, to all appearances, he was sleeping gently like an over-tired child. Strangely enough, it was the first time that I had seen his features in such absolute repose, and I caught myself examining each one of them with that careful minuteness and patience a geologist may bestow on a half-identified specimen--the lines at the corners of his mouth, the shape and setting of his chin, the high yet thin cheek-bones, the curl of the nostrils, and those hollow jaws of his, that seemed to be accentuated by curves of baleful but elusive significance. I had lived quite long enough, and had suffered disillusion sufficient, not to make the error into which fall so many earnest amateur disciples of Lavater, to pin my faith on any one of these features. In imagination I tried to add each point of elucidation to another, so that I might arrive at a just estimate of the true balance of his vices and virtues, for, believe me, no man is without some vice held in abeyance or left to flourish in riotous luxuriance.