had the most extraordinary luck in my profession, that in more than a hundred cases there have been but two where the criminal I was hunting escaped me. And now, Mrs. Bernauer, I will bid you good day.”      

       Muller stepped towards the window and motioned to Franz, who was walking up and down outside. The old man ran to the door and met the detective in the hall.     

       “You’d better go in and look after Mrs. Bernauer,” said the latter, “I can find my way out alone.”      

       Franz looked after him, shaking his head in bewilderment and then entered his own room. “Merciful God!” he exclaimed, bending down in terror over the housekeeper, who lay on the floor. In his shock and bewilderment he imagined that she too had been murdered, until he realised that it was only a swoon from which she recovered in a moment. He helped her regain her feet and she looked about as if still dazed, stammering: “Has he gone?”      

       “The strange man? ... Yes, he went some time ago. But what happened to you? Did he give you something to make you faint? Do you think he was a thief?”      

       Mrs. Bernauer shook her head and murmured: “Oh, no, quite the contrary.” A remark which did not enlighten Franz particularly as to the status of the man who had just left them. There was a note of fear in the housekeepers’s voice and she added hastily: “Does any one besides ourselves know that he was here?”      

       “No, Lizzie and the cook are in the kitchen talking about the murder.”      

       Mrs. Bernauer shivered again and went slowly out of the room and up the stairs.     

       If Franz believed that the stranger had left the house by the front entrance he was very much mistaken. When Muller found himself alone in the corridor he turned quickly and hurried out into the garden. None of the servants had seen him. Lizzie and the cook were engaged in an earnest conversation in the kitchen and Franz was fully occupied with Mrs. Bernauer. The gardener was away and his wife busy at her wash tubs. No one was aware, therefore, that Muller spent about ten minutes wandering about the garden, and ten minutes were quite sufficient for him to become so well acquainted with the place that he could have drawn a map of it. He left the garden 

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