"Well, why throw a good bargain away?" "A nice position it would have left me in. That of an understrapper for Burley to play cat and mouse with. Not if I know it! Burley likes to torture the people in his power as much as you do, the only difference being that his weapon is coarse brutality while yours is insidious charm." "Your comparisons, Cato, have the merit of being as unambiguous as they are rude. I trust you gave Hutchins Burley the benefit of a few of them." "Oh, no, I always forgive my enemies. Nothing enrages them more. I left Hutchins stunned. But I’ve no doubt he recovered in time to appoint the successor that I sent him." "That you sent him?" "Yes. You don’t know him, but Janet does. Janet, do you remember the tall, thin, aristocratic chap who was always mysteriously turning up and who stopped Burley at the tent?" "Of course I do. He wore a quaint stand-up collar with two points sticking into his neck. It was he who warned Claude about the raid." "Oh, did he? Well, when I was on my way up the stairs here at noon, he suddenly appeared, like a ghost stepping out of the stone wall. It gave me quite a start. I asked him where he was bound for. ’Nowhere in particular,’ was his answer." Robert had got to talking with the mysterious one, who confessed that he had just rented a flat in the model tenements. On Robert’s alluding to the severance of his connection with the _Evening Chronicle_, his new acquaintance had asked permission to apply for the vacant place. He claimed to have an ear for news and remarked casually that information was always drifting his way. "As if I had any permission to give!" continued Robert. "I warned him what he’d be up against in the person of Hutchins Burley, and bade him Godspeed." "He’s either a detective or the Prince of Zenda in disguise," said Janet. "Which do you think, Robert?" "From the speed and completeness with which he obliterates himself, I should favor the detective theory. On the other hand, there’s his get-up! That melancholy, drooping mustache, that semi-clerical collar, and that comical tip-tilted chin! The fellow’s simply unforgettable. He must be a prince incognito." "Yes, we’ll have him a prince!" exclaimed Janet, who, at twenty-four, had a normal craving for romantic illusion. "But I should like him in any part." "A prince! Nonsense, children!" interjected Cornelia, in her most languid cadences. "He’s probably a burglar." "A burglar!" "Certainly not a detective. Detectives don’t obliterate themselves. They don’t know how to. And they never look like princes in disguise. They’re not clever enough. All the detectives I ever saw looked like butchers on a strike. The only man, rich, skillful and bold enough to take his fellow man at a right royal disadvantage is a first-class burglar. A Raffles, for instance, might be a prince ’incognito.’" Cornelia’s wits could work brilliantly under the stimulus of a new friend like Janet.