"Mr. Rolston," I said, "I engage you from this moment as a member of my regular staff. Your salary to begin with will be ten pounds a week, and of course your expenses that you may incur in the course of your work. Do you accept these terms?"
Poor Bill Rolston! I mustn't give away the man who afterwards became my most faithful friend and most daring companion in hours of frightful peril, and a series of incredible adventures. Still, if he did burst into tears that's nothing against him, for I didn't realize till sometime afterwards that he was half starved and at the very end of his tether.
He pulled himself together in a moment or two, took a cup of tea and let me cross-question him. What he told me in the next half-hour I cannot set down here. It will appear in its proper place, but it is enough to say that in the whole of my experience I never listened to a more mysterious and more enthralling recital.
I think that from that moment I realized that my fate was to be in some way linked with the three towers on Richmond Hill, and the sense of excitement which had been with me all the afternoon, grew till it was almost unbearable.
"Now, first of all," I said, when he had told me everything, "you are not to breathe a word of this to any human soul without my permission. While you have been absent I have already been taking steps, the nature of which I shall not tell you at present. Meanwhile, lock up everything in your heart."
I had a flash of foresight, well justified in the event.
"I may want you at any moment," I told him, "and therefore, with your permission, I'm going to put you up at my flat in Piccadilly, where you will be well looked after and have everything you want. I'll telephone through to my man, Preston, giving him full instructions, and you had better take a taxi and get there at once. Preston will send a messenger to your lodgings to bring up any clothes and so forth you may require."
He blushed rosy red, and I wondered why, for his story had been told to me in a crisp, man-of-the-world manner that made him seem far older than he was.
Then he shrugged his shoulders, put his hand in his trousers pocket and pulled out—one penny.
"All I have in the world," he said, with a rueful smile.