"I—I do!" cried the voice from behind that strange disguise. "And I do all that you tell me," it whined. "Very well," laughed Boyne. "We’ll let it rest at that. The failure you lately had put me right in the cart. We mustn’t have another. Remember that! Let it sink into your brain. You are clever, I know. But a single slip and both of us will go where we don’t want to!" "I know! I know! Yes—yes," replied the huddled figure. "But it was the weather—always the weather. And it is so hot under that roof." "Weather be hanged!" replied Boyne. "This is winter—cold winter!—and yet you believe it to be summer." As a matter of fact, it was hot summer weather, yet Boyne was trying to impress upon his companion that heat was cold, and vice versa. The two weird figures in white cloaks, with only slits for the eyes, like Brothers of the Misericordia of Mediæval Italy, only in white, instead of black, sat opposite each other. Boyne was giving to his prisoner a breath of air, and a change in his living room. A few minutes later the strange occupant of the locked room uttered the single word: "Nibby?" "Oh, yes, dear little Nibby is here," was Boyne’s reply. Rising, he fumbled beneath his cloak, and with his key unlocked the cupboard and opened the cage, from which the tame rat darted down and across the room. A second later he was sniffing the cloak of the figure from upstairs, running around the hem of the cloak with his little pink nose, while the wearer of the cloak put down a hand to be smelt, saying: "Nibby, my dear little Nibby, that I have lost so long!" In all London no scene in broad daylight could have been more weird than that at noon on a summer morning in Bridge Place, Hammersmith. Boyne, the mystery man, held in such high esteem from Addison Road to Kew, sat there with the poor crouching figure as his victim. Behind those long narrow slits in the white fabric showed a pair of dark, deep-sunken eyes—eyes that were inhuman and unnatural. The voice from behind the mask was metallic and squeaky. Whether the person was a man or a woman could not be conjectured. The high-pitched note was feminine. "Am I not good to you to allow you this little relaxation?" asked Boyne. "You don’t often get it, I admit, for the old deaf crone is always about, and I can seldom get rid of her." "I—I felt—I felt very ill—last week. Days ago!" croaked the mysterious occupant of the locked room. "I go up to you every day. You never complained. You are usually asleep when I come up." "You come up at night. But all day I look out from the window over the roofs towards the river." "River! What do you mean? There is no river here. It is a desert—a desert of bricks and mortar. You dream." "Yes—yes. I dream! I—I’m always dreaming," was the response. It was evident that Boyne held his half-imbecile prisoner completely in his power, and that all the orders of the insurance agent were obeyed.