“Shall I ever solve the mystery?” cried the Professor aloud to himself as he paced the room presently. “Misfortune has befallen me! With that fragment deciphered I could by careful study have learned the key and then read what that mysterious searcher has undoubtedly read. Ah! if I could only meet him. Then I would follow and watch his movements. But alas! I am always too late—too late!”
As he sank again into a chair, plunged in the wildest despair, the dark figure of a tall, thick-set, military-looking man of about forty, in a long dark overcoat, passed and repassed the house in the rainy night.
For some time, he had been waiting at Notting Hill Gate Station, almost opposite the end of Pembridge Gardens, glancing at the clock now and then, as though impatiently watching for someone. Then, at last, as if full of determination he had crossed the Bayswater Road, and strolled slowly past Professor Griffin’s house, eyeing its lighted windows with considerable curiosity as he went by.
He continued his walk as far as the end of the road which led into Pembridge Square, and there halted for shelter for a full five minutes beneath the portico of a house. Then he retraced his steps, re-passing the house which had aroused so much interest within him, until he came to the station where he again stood in patience.
The watcher was an active, rather good-looking man, though the reason of his presence there was not at all apparent. To pass the time he bought an evening paper, and stood in the corner reading it, yet in such a position that he could watch everybody who entered or left the Underground Railway Station. There was a slight foreign cast in his features. His keen dark eyes were searching everywhere, while the clothes he wore were the clothes of a man of refined taste.
From time to time there played about his dark face a sinister smile—a smile of triumph. He was evidently not a man to be trifled with, and it seemed very much as though he held the owner of that comfortable house in resentment.
The words he muttered as he stood there pretending to read were, in themselves, sufficient indication of this:
“They thought to trick him—to trick me—but by Jove, they’ll find themselves mistaken!” and his claw-like hand gripped the newspaper until it trembled in his grasp.
He lit a cigarette, and twice crossed the road. Standing at the corner of Pembridge Gardens, he again looked up the street, dark, misty, and deserted on that winter’s night.
“They laugh at us without a doubt,” he muttered to himself. “They laugh, because they think he’s fool enough to give away the secret. Yes, they take him for a blind idiot. Frank Farquhar has gone upon a fool’s errand to Denmark, intending to ‘freeze us out’ of what is justly ours. When he returns, he will find that I have checkmated both him and his friend Griffin, in a manner in which he little expects.”