A platitude? Possibly. But two-thirds of the words of wisdom uttered by great men, and handed down as tradition to a worshipping posterity, are platitudes of the most commonplace type, if you really come to analyse them. Time hung heavily. It generally ends by hanging heavily upon a man without occupation. But put yourself for a moment in my place. I had lost my love, and those days of inactivity and longing were doubly tedious because I ached to bestir myself somehow, anyhow, to clear up a mystery which, though gradually fading from the mind of a public ever athirst for fresh sensation, was actively alive in my own thoughts--the one thought, indeed, ever present in my mind. Why had the Thorolds so suddenly and mysteriously disappeared? Thus it occurred to me, two days after Davies and Vera had called at my flat, to stroll down into Belgravia and interview the caretaker at 102, Belgrave Street. Possibly by this time, I reflected, he might have seen Sir Charles Thorold, or heard from him. When I had rung three times, the door slowly opened to the length of its chain, and I think quite the queerest-looking little old man I had ever set eyes on, peered out. He gazed with his sharp, beady eyes up into my face for a moment or two, then asked, in a broken quavering voice-- "Are you another newspaper gen'leman?" "Oh, no," I answered, laughing, for I guessed at once how he must have been harassed by reporters, and I could sympathise with him. "I am not a journalist--I'm only a gentleman." Of course he was too old to note the satire, but the fact that I wore a silk hat and a clean collar, seemed to satisfy him that I must be a person of some consequence, and when I had assured him that I meant him no ill, but that, on the contrary, I might have something to tell him that he would like to hear, he shut the door, and I heard his trembling old hands remove the chain. "And how long is it since Sir Charles was last here?" I said to him, when he had shown me into his little room on the ground floor, where a kettle purred on a gas-stove. "I know him well, you know; I was staying at Houghton Park when he disappeared." He looked me up and down, surprised and apparently much interested. "Were you indeed, sir?" he exclaimed. "Well, now--well, well!" "Why don't you sit down and make yourself comfortable, my old friend," I went on affably. I drew forward his armchair, and he sank into it with a grunt of relief. "You are a very kind gen'leman, you are, very kind indeed," he said, in a tone that betrayed true gratitude. "Ah! I've known gen'lemen in my time, and I know a gen'leman when I sees one, I do." "What part of Norfolk do you come from?" I asked, as I took a seat near him, for I knew the Norfolk brogue quite well. He looked at me and grinned. "Well, now, that's strange you knowing I come from Norfolk! But it's true. Oh, yes, it is right. I'm a Norfolk man. I was born in Diss. I mind the time my father--"