'These details are unimportant. Again—how did you know him?'
'I asked the Policeman who the gentleman was. He said it was Mr. Edmund Gray. I asked the newspaper boy at the Holborn entrance. He said it was Mr. Edmund Gray, and that everybody knew him.'
'So everybody knows him. Well, Checkley, I see nothing so very remarkable about your seeing a man so well known in the Inn. It adds nothing to our knowledge. That he exists, we know already. What share, if any, he has had in this case of ours remains still a mystery. Unless, that is, you have found out something else.'
Checkley gazed upon his master with a kind of stupor. 'No—no,' he murmured. 'I can't.'
'What did you do, when you found out that it was the man?'
'Nothing.'
'You did nothing. Well—under the circumstances I don't know what you could have done.'
'And he walked away.'
'Oh! He walked away. Very important indeed.—But, Checkley, this story does not in the least account for your strange agitation this morning. Have you anything more to tell me? I see that you have, but you seem to experience more than usual difficulty in getting it out.'
The clerk hesitated. 'Do you,' he asked at last—'do you—happen—to know Gray's Inn?'