"Mr. Oswald De Gex, the well-known international financier, is to be entertained on Thursday next to luncheon by the Lord Mayor and Corporation at the Mansion House. The Prime Ministers of Spain and the Netherlands, who are in London on official business, will be included among the guests. Mr. De Gex, though he has a house in London, is seldom here. He has recently been engaged in a great financial scheme to secure for England the whole of the output of the rich oil field recently discovered in Ecuador." So Oswald De Gex was still in London! I held my breath. With his wall of wealth before him he seemed invulnerable. I recollected those crisp Bank of England notes which still reposed in a drawer at Rivermead Mansions--the bribe I had so foolishly accepted to become his accomplice in that mysterious crime. Gabrielle Engledue! Who was the girl whose body, because of my false certificate, had been reduced to ashes in order to destroy all evidence of foul play? Who was she--and what was the motive? If I could only ascertain the latter, then I might be able to reconstruct the crime slowly, piece by piece. But as far as I could see there was an utter absence of motive. Long ago I had arrived at the conclusion that by the death of the unknown girl named Engledue, the unscrupulous financier had added some considerable sum to his bank balance. But how? His crafty unscrupulousness was shown by the manner in which his partner, to whom he owed a big sum, had been cleverly secretly killed by a hireling--a friend of the dead Despujol. Oswald De Gex posed to the world as an honest and upright man of business whose financial aid was welcomed cordially by all the hard-up States in Europe. He posed as a philanthropist, and as such earned a big reputation in those countries in which the operations of the all-powerful group he controlled were carried on. But I knew his methods, and I sat staggered at the fact that the Corporation of the City of London were about to entertain him. Yet money counts always. Did not the Lord Mayor and Corporation once entertain the man who gave a service of gold communion-plate to St. Paul's Cathedral, and who afterwards spent many years in one of His Majesty's gaols? My blood boiled within me when I read that announcement. Yet on calmer consideration, I resolved to still wait and watch. I returned to London on the following Friday, and in the train I read of the splendid luncheon given on the previous day to the arch-criminal and the eulogistic speeches made by two English politicians and the two foreign Premiers. Oswald De Gex was declared to be one of the greatest financiers of the age, and there was a hint that a certain Allied Government was about to enlist his efforts with a view to extricate it from national bankruptcy.