Neither of the two men had slept that night. A bundle of papers, each giving a brief account of the tragedy, was at the detective’s elbow. He looked across to Talham in his worn garments. You could not pity the tall man. His confidence, his self-satisfaction--in the best sense of the word--precluded pity. He sat now with a fragrant cigar between his teeth, a steaming cup of coffee within reach on a little table by his side, his legs crossed--a model of contentment. “I gather, of course,” Tillizinni went on, “that you wanted to find the Ts’in tomb, and I must confess that I regarded your search as being little removed, in point of self-interest, from the efforts of our Chinese friends.” Talham shook his head. “Accustomed as you are to the venal predilections----” he began. Tillizinni put up his hands to his ears in mock despair. “Do you forget that I am Italian?” he asked. The great anthropologist was a man of quick likes and quicker dislikes. Never before had he found one to whom he felt so warm and so instant a regard as he did with this adventurer. Add the warm and generous qualities of his southern nature, interest in the _rara humanis_ which his science dictated, and there is every excuse for the sudden friendship which has so often been the subject of criticism. Tillizinni was at the zenith of his fame; he had handled the danger of the Fourth Plague with rare courage and ingenuity, and his name at this time was in all mouths. Even Scotland Yard, a cautious institution which does not take the stranger to its bosom, however brilliant he may be, had succumbed to his fascination, and Room 673E was “Mr. Tillizinni’s Room,” just as surely and unalterably as Room 1 is the Chief Commissioner’s. He leant forward to stir the fire, and to return an escaping coal to its glowing inferno. “Will your man do the work you require?” he asked. “In the time?” The detective nodded, and Talham pursed his lips thoughtfully. “He has till eleven,” he said; “and a Chinese mechanic can do much in seven hours.” There was a restful little interval of silence, which Tillizinni broke. “It is most fantastic--the most bizarre idea I have ever heard,” he said. “From no other human being in the world would I accept such a story. Yet I believe you.” “Of course you do,” retorted Talham simply. Tillizinni stared; then an amused smile crossed his thin lips. The other surveyed him with great earnestness, then leant forward. “Signor Tillizinni,” he said, “the acquirement of wealth is a process which too often dissipates the qualities of self-respect. I will be a millionaire, not as the thief who robbed a tomb of dross”--he snapped his fingers finely--“but as the genius who wrested from the dead ages the secret and its attainments. I am satisfied that in the tomb of Ts’in I shall have revealed to me that supreme mechanical wonder of all time--perpetual motion.”