"Come in," he commanded briefly. The boy obeyed. Surreptitiously he wiped the wet and mud from his face and tried to reduce his wild breathing. The room which he entered was meagre and stale-smelling, with bare floor and stained and sagging wall-paper; unfurnished save for a battered deal table and some chairs. He sank into one of them and stared with frank curiosity past his employer, who had often entrusted him with messages requiring secrecy, past his employer's companion, to the third figure in the room. A prostrate figure which lay quite still under the heavy folds of a long dark ulster with its face turned to the wall. "Well?" It was a singularly agreeable voice which aroused him, softly modulated but with a faint foreign accent. The speaker was his employer, a slender dark man, with a finely carved face, immobile as the Sphinx. He had laid aside his Inverness and top hat, and showed himself in evening dress with a large buttonhole of Parma violets, which sent forth a faint, delicious fragrance. Of the personality of the man the messenger knew nothing more than that he was an aristocratic young nob, eccentric in a quiet way, who lived in a grand house near Portland Place, and who rewarded him handsomely for his occasional services. He related his adventures of the evening, not omitting to mention his late pursuer. "The keb's waitin' now, outside, sir," he concluded. The man listened quietly, brooding, his elbows upon the table, his inscrutable face propped in the crotch of his hand. A ruby, set quaintly in a cobra's head, gleamed from a ring upon his little finger. Presently he roused. "That's all to-night, my boy," he said gravely. "You've served me well." He drew out his purse, extracted two sovereigns, and laid them in the messenger's hand. "And this," he said softly, holding up a third gold piece, "is for--discretion! You comprehend?" The boy shot a swift glance, not unmixed with terror, at the still, recumbent figure in the corner, mumbled an assent, and withdrew. Out in the dampness of the fog, he took a long, deep breath. After all, he reflected, such affairs were not in the province of a night-messenger. They belonged to Scotland Yard. And certainly the man paid well. As the door closed behind him, his employer leaned back in his chair, and smiled into the sombre eyes of his companion. "At last!" he breathed softly. "The thing moves. The wheels are beginning to revolve!" His friend nodded gloomily, his glance straying off toward the corner of the room. "They've got to revolve a mighty lot more before the night's done!" he replied with heavy significance. He was a tall, lean man and wore a brown overcoat with the collar turned up sharply about his throat, and a derby hat still glistening from the mist. His voice, which was flat and rasping, betrayed his transatlantic origin.