The walk uptown did me good. The rain had ceased, and the air felt clean and fresh as though it had been washed. I took deep breaths of it, and the feeling of fatigue and depression which had weighed upon me gradually vanished. I was in no hurry—went out of my way a little, indeed, to walk out into Madison Square and look back at the towering mass of the Flatiron building, creamy and delicate as carved ivory under the rays of the moon—and it was long past midnight when I finally turned in at the Marathon. Higgins, the janitor, was just closing the outer doors, and he joined me in the elevator a moment later.
"There's a gentleman waiting to see you, sir," he said, as the car started upward. "Mr. Godfrey, sir. He came in about ten minutes ago. He said you were expecting him, so I let him into your rooms."
"That was right," I said, and reflected again upon Godfrey's exhaustless energy.
I found him lolling in an easy chair, and he looked up with a smile at my entrance. "Higgins said you hadn't come in yet," he explained, "so I thought I'd wait a few minutes on the off chance that you mightn't be too tired to talk. If you are, say so, and I'll be moving along."
"I'm not too tired," I said, hanging up my coat. "I feel a good deal better than I did an hour ago."
"I saw that you were about all in."
"How do you keep it up, Godfrey?" I asked, sitting down opposite him.
"You don't seem tired at all."
"I am tired, though," he said, "a little. But I've got a fool brain that won't let my body go to sleep so long as there is work to be done. Then, as soon as everything is finished, the brain lets go and the body sleeps like a log. Now I knew I couldn't go to sleep properly to-night until I had heard the very interesting theory you are going to confide to me. Besides, I have a thing or two to tell you."
"Go ahead," I said.
"We had a cable from our Paris office just before I left. It seems that M. Théophile d'Aurelle plays the fiddle in the orchestra of the Café de Paris. He played as usual to-night, so that it is manifestly impossible that he should also be lying in the New York morgue. Moreover, none of his friends, so far as he knows, is in America. No doubt he may be able to identify the photograph of the dead man, and we've already started one on the way, but we can't hear from it for six or eight days. But my guess was right—the fellow's name isn't d'Aurelle."