“Jolly comfortable quarters,” I remarked, glancing round. “I called here before, but you were out.”
“Yes, so sorry!” he exclaimed. “Sit down and have a cigar,” and he handed me a box of most excellent weeds.
“Well,” exclaimed the smart young fellow who was the confidential secretary of Sir Albert Oppenheim, “I’m really glad to see you again, Mr Holford. That was a most mysterious incident at Sussex Place the other evening,” he added. “I’m still convinced that somebody was in the house. The Professor’s furnace was alight, you recollect, and the laboratory door stood open.”
“Langton has told me all about it,” remarked the doctor in a deep voice; “very curious, it seems.”
“Most extraordinary,” I declared, “and the more so that Merli, the butler, should have suddenly disappeared. The other day I met him in Rome.”
“Met Antonio!” gasped Ethelwynn’s lover, staring at me in amazement. “Have you been to Italy?”
“Yes. I told him of our search, but he declared himself ignorant of everything, though he admitted having seen you passing through the buffet at Calais-Maritime.”
“What is he doing in Rome?”
“I have no idea; I was there in a vain endeavour to recover my lost wife. She has been misled by a forged telegram purporting to come from myself, and is somewhere on the Continent. Where, however, I cannot tell.”
“You’ve lost your wife, eh?” asked the doctor, glancing strangely across at his companion, I thought. His face was dark and aquiline, his shoulders sloped. He was not a man to be trusted. “You think she’s been tricked?” he added. “Why?”