He paused for a moment, dropped the pointing hand, and sat down again on his chair, seemingly overcome with his own rhetoric. Smeaton regarded him steadily, uncertain as to what new form his eccentricity would take, but spoke no word. In a few seconds he had recovered himself, and smiled wanly at his companion. "Enough of that. You are a man of vast experience, and you have seen men and cities. But I bet you would never guess that not so many years ago I was one of the young bloods of this town, one of what our neighbours across the Channel call the _jeunesse doree_." And at last Smeaton was moved to speech. He looked at the well-cut but worn clothes; he remembered Winchester and Cambridge; he recognised the flamboyant and ill-controlled temperament. He drew his deductions swiftly. "You were born with a silver spoon in your mouth," he said bluntly; "you had every advantage that birth and education could give you. Through some fatal tendency, perhaps inherited, you threw away all your chances, and are living on your memories--and very little else." So far from being offended with this plain exposition of facts, Mr Boyle smiled affably, and, leaning forward, patted the detective approvingly on the shoulder. "You're a man after my own heart, sir; you go to the very marrow of things. You have hit it off correctly. But mark you, I regret nothing; I would alter nothing if the time came over again. I have lived, sir: warmed both hands at the fire of life; filled the cup of enjoyment to the brim. Nothing has daunted me, nothing ever will daunt me. Old as I am, derelict as I may be, I still look the world in the face, and, in the words of the poet, `Stand four-square to all the winds that blow.'" Smeaton stirred uncomfortably. Was the man simply an original kind of beggar, and was all this the preface to a request for a modest loan? He had assurance enough for anything! "Mr Boyle, my time is really very much occupied. May I beg you to come to the point, and state the object of your visit? These personal reminiscences and reflections are, of course, highly interesting, but--" He made an eloquent pause. "I have transgressed, I have abused your patience," observed this singular man, in a voice of contrition; "I came to ask you a simple question, and here it is, plain, straight, and put as briefly as possible: _What is at the bottom of Reginald Monkton's disappearance_?" Smeaton looked up sharply. "Who says that he has disappeared?" he asked with some asperity. Mr Boyle smiled blandly. "Why beat about the bush? Monkton is not in his place in the House. There is not a line in the papers about his movements, except that he is on the Riviera. The public may not yet have tumbled to it. But Fleet Street knows. The House of Commons knows. The clubs know. And last--you and I know. I still have some connection with the world in which I was once not an insignificant figure."