"Then I'll do something!" I cried. "I'll get a question asked in the House. It's a scandal that, with Professor Greer killed in his own home, you refuse to bestir yourselves. After all, it seems quite true, as has been recently alleged, that the police are nowadays so fully occupied in regulating the speed of motor-cars that they have no time for the investigation of crime." I noticed that at my threat to have a question asked in the House, one of the officers pulled a rather wry face. The Metropolitan Police were not fond, I knew, of questions being put about them. I chanced to know rather intimately a member for a country division, though to get the question put would necessitate my explaining the whole affair. Yet was not Mabel's liberty--nay, perhaps her very life--at stake? "You've told us very little regarding this friend of yours, Mr. Kershaw Kirk, whom you appear to suspect so strongly," the younger of the two men remarked at last. "Who is he?" "An adventurer," I replied quickly. "I have no doubt whatever upon that point." The man pursed his lips dubiously. "May it not be that you are somewhat prejudiced against him?" he ventured to suggest. "No. He was in the house at the time when the Professor's body was cremated in his own furnace. If you went to Sussex Place you would probably discover some remains among the ashes." "Do you allege, then, that you were an actual witness of the cremation?" asked the officer. "No; I found him in the house." "And, later on, you discovered the furnace alight, eh?" "Yes." "Then it is only a surmise on your part, after all, my dear sir," remarked the detective, twisting a pen between his fingers as his dark eyes were fixed upon mine. "The actual evidence is really _nil_. That is just the view taken by the Commissioner." "But my wife is in the hands of the assassins," I cried. "You can't deny that!" "Is there any actual, evidence of it? None, as far as we can see," he declared. "Would it not be natural for your wife, on failing to find you in Florence, either to wire to her sister at home or to return home at once? She did neither, which only goes far to prove that she did not desire to return to London." "You suggest that she has purposely left me?" I cried, staring at the man in a frenzy of angry resentment. "I suggest nothing, Mr. Holford. Pray don't misunderstand me. I merely put before you the facts in order to obtain a logical conclusion. Only one can be arrived at--she had some motive for not returning to her home. If she had, then how are we to find her? She would, no doubt, purposely cover her tracks." "But she was with that man, the man who--" "And that just bears out my argument," interrupted the detective. "But may she not have been prevented from sending any message home?" I suggested, though that very point he had made had, I confess, been the one which had continually obsessed me. Both the detectives shook their heads.