"He didn't mention his name. He only said that an intimate friend of his, an Italian from Rome, had, he knew, arrived in London and suddenly disappeared. He had prosecuted most diligent search, and having ascertained from the registrar of deaths that an Italian had died there he wondered whether it might not be his friend. Whereupon I at once described a man something like Father Christmas without his muff and holly, and at length he went away quite satisfied that the man who died upstairs was not the person he was in search of." "He didn't say where he was living, or leave any address?" "He wasn't likely to if he's one of Miller's crowd," my friend exclaimed. "But I wonder what's in the wind? He has some distinct object in establishing Nardini's death." "Probably fears some revelation which the fugitive might make if he had fallen into the hands of the police," I suggested. "The ex-Minister wasn't a very bright specimen himself from all accounts and from those papers we discovered. He was a blackmailer and a brute, as well as an embezzler." "Well," declared Sammy, "if you really have direct evidence against this fellow Gordon-Wright, I should just tell the truth at Scotland Yard. I'd dearly love to see Miller in the dock, too, for if any one deserves to pick oakum for a few years, he does. But he's such a cunning knave, and passes so well as a gentleman, that nobody ever suspects." "They say he's dined and slept at half the best country-houses in Dorsetshire and Devonshire, and I believe he's going to hunt from Market Harborough this coming season." "The deuce he is! What infernal audacity! I feel myself like denouncing him." "Better not--at least at present, my dear fellow. Besides--for his daughter's sake." "Daughter be hanged! She's as bad as her father, every bit." "No, I disagree with you there," I protested. "The girl is innocent of it all. She believes implicitly in her father, but beyond that she is in some deadly fear--of what I can't yet make out." "Then you've seen her lately, eh?" "Quite recently," I replied, though I told him nothing of the exciting events of the past seven or eight days. The knowledge I had gathered I intended to keep to myself, at least for the present. About four o'clock that afternoon I called upon Ella's aunt, a widow named Tremayne, who lived in a comfortable house in Porchester Terrace. I was ceremoniously shown into the drawing-room by the grey-headed old butler, and presently Mrs Tremayne, an angular old person in a cap with yellow ribbons, appeared, staring at me through her gold-rimmed spectacles and carrying my card in her hand. I had met her on one occasion only, in the days when Ella and I used to meet in secret in those squares about Bayswater, and I saw that she did not recollect me.