"You are a fast walker," David said, presently.

"That's because I am thinking fast," Bell replied. "Steel, you are in great trouble?"

"It needs no brilliant effort on your part to see that," David said, bitterly. "Besides, you heard a great deal just now when you--you--"

"Listened," Bell said, coolly. "Of course I had no intention of playing eavesdropper; and I had no idea who the Mr. Steel was who wanted to see Miss Gates. They come day by day, my dear fellow, garbed in the garb of Pall Mall or Petticoat Lane as the case may be, but they all come for money. Sometimes it is a shilling, sometimes 100. But I did not gather from your chat with Miss Gates what your trouble was."

"Perhaps not, but Miss Gates knew perfectly well."

Bell patted his companion, approvingly.

"It is a pleasure to help a lucid-minded man like yourself," he said.

"You go straight to the root of the sore and cut all the superfluous matter away. I was deeply interested in the conversation which I overheard just now. You are in great trouble, and that trouble is connected with 219, Brunswick Square--a house where you have never been before."

"My dear chap, I was in that dining-room two nights ago. Nothing will convince me to the--"

"There you are wrong, because I am going to convince you to the contrary. You may smile and shake your head, but before an hour has pa.s.sed I am going to convince you beyond all question that you were never inside No. 219."

"Brave words," David muttered. "Still, an hour is not a long time to wait."

"No. But you must enlighten me if I am to a.s.sist you. I am profoundly interested. You come to the house of my friend on a desperate errand.

Miss Gates is a perfect stranger to you, and yet the mere discovery of your ident.i.ty fills her with the most painful agitation. Therefore, though you have never been in 219 before, you are pretty certain, and I am pretty certain, that Ruth Gates knows a deal about the thing that is touching you. On the contrary, I know nothing on that head. Won't you let me into the secret?"

"I'll tell you part," Steel replied. "And I'll put it pithily. For mere argument we a.s.sume that I am selected to a.s.sist a damsel in distress who lives at No. 219, Brunswick Square. We will a.s.sume that the conversation leading up to the flattering selection took place over the telephone. As a matter of fact, it did take place over the telephone. The thing was involved with so much secrecy that I naturally hesitated. I was offered 1,000 for my services; also I was reminded by my unseen messenger that I was in dire need of that money."

"And were you?"

"My dear fellow, I don't fancy that I should have hesitated at burglary to get it. And all I had to do was to meet a lady secretly in the dead of night at No. 219, and tell her how to get out of a certain difficulty. It all resolved itself round the synopsis of a proposed new story of mine.

But I had better go into details."

David proceeded to do so. Bell, with his arm crooked through that of his companion, followed the story with an intelligent and flattering interest.

"Very strange and very fascinating," he said, presently. "I'll think it out presently. n.o.body could possibly think of anything but their toes in Western Road. Go on."

"Now I am coming to the point. I had the money, I had that lovely cigar-case, and subsequently I had that battered and bleeding specimen of humanity dumped down in the most amazing manner in my conservatory. The cigar-case lay on the conservatory floor, remember--swept off the table when I clutched for the telephone bell to call for the police. When Marley came he asked if the cigar-case was mine. At first I said no, because, you see--"

"I see quite plainly. Pray go on."

"Well, I lose that cigar-case; I leave it in the offices of Mossa, to whom I pay nearly 1,000. Mossa, to spite me, takes or sends the case to the police, who advertise it not knowing that it is mine. You will see why they advertise it presently--"

"Because it belonged to the injured man, eh?"

David pulled up and regarded his companion with amazement.

"How on earth--" he gasped. "Do you mean to say that you know--"

"Nothing at present, I a.s.sure you," Bell said, coolly. "Call it intuition, if you like. I prefer to call it the result of logical mental process. I'm right, of course?"

"Of course you are. I'd claimed that case for my own. I had cut my initials inside, as I showed Marley when I went to the police-station.

And then Marley tells me how I paid Mossa nearly 1,000; how the money must have come into my hands in the nick of time. That was pretty bad when I couldn't for the life of me give a lucid reason for the possession of those notes; but there was worse to come. In the pocket of the injured man was a receipt for a diamond-studded gun-metal cigar-case, purchased the day of the outrage. And Walen, the jeweller, proved beyond a doubt that the case I claimed was purchased at his shop."

Bell nodded gravely.

"Which places you in an exceedingly awkward position," he said.

"A mild way of putting it," David replied. "If that fellow dies the police have enough evidence to hang me. And what is my defence? The story of my visit to No. 219. And who would believe that c.o.c.k-and-bull story?

Fancy a drama like that being played out in the house of such a pillar of respectability as Gilead Gates."

"It isn't his house," said Bell. "He only takes it furnished."

"In anybody else your remark would be puerile," David said, irritably.

"It's a deeper remark than you are aware of at present," Bell replied. "I quite see your position. n.o.body would believe you, of course. But why not go to the post-office and ask the number of the telephone that called you up from London?"

The question seemed to amuse David slightly. Then his lips were drawn humorously.

"When my logical formula came back I thought of that," he said. "On inquiring as to who it was rang me up on that fateful occasion I learnt that the number was 0017 Kensington and that--"

"Gates's own number at Prince's Gate," Bell exclaimed. "The plot thickens."

"It does, indeed," David said, grimly. "It is Wilkie Collins gone mad, Gaboriau _in extremis_, Du Boisgobey suffering from _delirium tremens_.

I go to Gates's house here, and am solemnly told in the midst of surroundings that I can swear to that I have never been there before; the whole mad expedition is launched by the turning of the handle of a telephone in the house of a distinguished, trusted, if prosaic, citizen. Somebody gets hold of the synopsis of a story of mine, Heaven knows how--"

"That is fairly easy. The synopsis was short, I suppose?"

"Only a few lines, say 1,000 words, a sheet of paper. My writing is very small. It was tucked into a half-penny open envelope--a magazine office envelope, marked 'Proof, urgent.' There were the proofs of a short story in the buff envelope."

"Which reached its destination in due course?"

"So I hear this morning. But how on earth--"

"Easily enough. The whole thing gets slipped into a larger open envelope, the kind of big-mouthed affair that enterprising firms send out circulars and patterns with. This falls into the hands of the woman who is at the bottom of this and every other case, and she reads the synopsis from sheer curiosity. The case fits her case, and there you are. Mind you, I don't say that this is how the thing actually happened, but how it might have done so. When did you post the letter?"

"I can't give you the date. Say ten days ago."

"And there would be no hurry for a reply," Bell said, thoughtfully. "And you had no cause for worry on that head. Nor need the woman who found it have kept the envelope beyond the delay of a single post, which is only a matter of an hour or so in London. If you go a little farther we find that money is no object, hence the 1,000 offer and the careful, and doubtless expensive, inquiry into your position. Steel, I am going to enjoy this case."

"You're welcome to all the fun you can get out of it," David said, grimly. "So far as I am concerned, I fail to see the humour. Isn't this the office you are after?"

Bell nodded and disappeared, presently to return with two exceedingly rusty keys tied together with a drab piece of tape. He jingled them on his long, slender forefinger with an air of positive enjoyment.

"Now come along," he said. "I feel like a boy who has marked down something rare in the way of a bird's nest. We will go back to Brunswick Square exactly the same way as you approached it on the night of the great adventure."

CHAPTER IX

THE BROKEN FIGURE