“Well, Holford,” he exclaimed, stretching his slippered feet lazily towards the fire, “so you have, after all, proved a traitor, eh?”
“A traitor? How?” I asked, standing near the fireplace and facing him.
“You have been telling some extraordinary stories about me at Scotland Yard, I hear,” he said with a grin.
“Ah!” I cried. “Then you are a detective, after all? My surmise was right from the first!”
“No,” he replied very quietly, “you were quite wrong, my dear sir; I’m not a detective, neither professional nor amateur, nor have I anything whatever to do with Scotland Yard. They may be sad blunderers there, but they do not accept every cock-and-bull story that may be told them.”
“I told them no cock-and-bull story!” I protested angrily. “I told them the actual truth!”
“And that after all the warnings I have given you!” he said in a tone of bitterest reproach. “Ah! you are unaware of the extreme gravity of that act of yours. You have broken faith with me, Holford, and by doing so, have, I fear, brought upon me, as upon others, a great calamity.”
“But you are so mysterious. You have never been open and above-board with me!” I declared. “You are full of mystery.”
“Did I not tell you on the first evening you sat here with me that I was a dealer in secrets?” he asked, blowing a cloud of smoke from his cigar.
“No, Holford,” went on my mysterious neighbour, very seriously, “you are like most other men—far too inquisitive. Had you been able to repress your curiosity, and at the same time preserve your pledge of secrecy, matters to-day would have been vastly different, and, acting in concert, we might have been able to solve this extraordinary enigma of Professor Greer’s death. But now you’ve been and made all sorts of wild statements to the Commissioner of Police. Well, it has stultified all my efforts.”