Rising impatiently, I began striding rapidly up and down the room. Hitherto the minutes had gone by on the wings of the wind. I had not been conscious of the flight of time, although the hands on the travelling clock in front of me had travelled round the dial two, if not three, times. Now the seconds seemed made of lead. They would not pass. They hung about me, and fretted me. Again and again I asked myself: "Why does not Jose Casteno telegraph me as he had promised and tell me where he is and how he has fared since he slipped off on the track of the hunchback?" It was no good. No answer came, and bit by bit there formed in my mind a new suspicion, a new dread. What if the Spaniard had taken fright at the publicity the crime had obtained and had left his chase of Zouche to secure his own safety in some far-off land, where he would never be suspected and where he could never be found? I might wait, then, until the crack of doom: Colonel Napier would remain unavenged. Feverishly I tore out into the streets and bought up all the late editions of the evening papers which I could lay my hands on. This mysterious crime had impressed the stolid imagination of Londoners so well accustomed to horrors that end in nothingness to a degree that was quite unusual; and all the journals had launched out into lurid descriptions of the dead man and the manner of his passing so that a horrid sense of nausea seized on me, and I cursed journalism and all its loathsome enterprise; albeit it I was most eager myself at the same moment to take advantage of its discoveries. One paper, however, had got a paragraph that threw a new light on the occurrence--the _Star_--and I read it with throbbing eagerness: A STARTLING THEORY