"But I have never been photographed in my life except for passport purposes during the War; and my appearance today is not as it was then, I no longer wear a beard—"
"You nevertheless had recently been photographed by flashlight, in the act of opening a safe in the Stuyvesant Ashe home. Some ingenious member of the household, in anticipation of the Lone Wolf's visit, had rigged up a camera commanding the safe and a flashlight to be set off by electric current when the door was tampered with. You were caught at close range, facing the camera as you knelt with your ear to the safe door, listening to its mechanism. The likeness was exact and unmistakable; and all the papers reproduced it to further the hue and cry."
"You tell me that happened—and ask me to believe the Lone Wolf left that house without wrecking the camera!"
"To the contrary you destroyed a camera utterly; but there were two, the ingenuity of the inventor had been equal to that contingency—one carefully concealed, the other where you might find it without too much trouble."
Lanyard had an unpleasant laugh in his throat. "Decidedly he was right who said a reformed crook could never come back! If I was the dupe of so cheap a trick . . . But to resume: I appealed to you—to a woman!—to stand between me and the police. . . . Ask them to believe that who once hunted the Lone Wolf across Europe and back again—and failed to catch him! . . . Well and good! what then?"
"The chase struck a false scent and passed us by; but from that time on you made your home with me. It was safe, that had been proved; and I was useful to you."
"How useful?"
"You had got together a collection of jewellery difficult to dispose of without courting arrest; also, you would have found it impracticable to take care of large sums of money such as this sale realized. I saw to all that for you: through Morphew I found a way to market the jewels, and in my own name I carried your funds in a separate account with my bankers."
"And I still called myself the Lone Wolf!"
"I think you were learning to be less jealous of your loneliness, Michael. You had learned—as most men do at some stage of life—that there was one woman at least whose devotion would never fail you."