Very early on a July morning in 1919 Constable Brown was on his beat in Kensington, in the immediate neighbourhood of Cathcart Square. Cathcart Square was an old-fashioned backwater of this highly respectable suburb. It had not been built on any regular lines. Small, narrow houses nestled comfortably by the side of what might be called mansions. At the entrance to the Square itself, a narrow-fronted milk-shop stood next door to a palatial residence. The dairy was very old, and the Square, with its strange agglomeration of houses, had been built round it.

The scene was Dean Street, Soho, and this story opens on a snowy winter night in the January of 1888. The modern improvements of Shaftesbury Avenue were as yet unmade, and the foreign district of London had still to be opened up. A cold north wind was blowing on the few pedestrians whom necessity, or some urgent obligation, had compelled to tramp the pavements laden with snow. A few cabs and carriages crawled along the difficult roadway to the Royalty Theatre, deposited their occupants and crawled back again.

"Why, what's the matter, child? Tell me." "Nothing, dad-really nothing." "But you are breathing hard; your hand trembles; your pulse beats quickly. There's something amiss-I'm sure there is. Now, what is it? Come, no secrets." The girl, quickly snatching away her hand, answered with a forced laugh, "How absurd you really are, dear old dad You're always fancying something or other."

Warm, brilliant, and cloudless was the July noon. Beneath the summer sun the broad, shallow waters of the Meuse sparkled as they rippled swiftly onward through the deep, winding valley of grey rocks and cool woods on their way from the mountains of Lorraine, through peaceful, prosperous Belgium, towards the sea.

The remarkable secret revealed in the following pages is not purely fiction. The discovery, much in the form that I have here presented it, has actually been made, and its discoverer, a well-known professor at one of the Universities in the North of Europe, recently placed the extraordinary statement in my hands.

"That man knows too much " "Do you really think he overheard?" "He may not have done. But we must take no risks, my dear fellow. Remember we are at war With people who know too much there's but one way-dismissal," declared Lewin Rodwell, the tall, well-groomed middle-aged man, in morning-coat and grey trousers, who stood in the panelled boardroom with his chairman, Sir Boyle Huntley, the other directors having left after the weekly meeting of the board.

In order to ease my conscience and, further, to disclose certain facts which for the past year or two have, I know, greatly puzzled readers of our daily newspapers, I have decided to here reveal some very curious and, perhaps, sensational circumstances. In fact, after much perplexity and long consideration, I have resolved, without seeking grace or favor, to make a clean breast of all that happened to me, and to leave the reader to judge of my actions, and either to condemn or to condone my offenses.

I hereby tender an apology to the reader for being compelled, in these curious chronicles of an adventurous motorist and his actions towards certain of his female acquaintances, to omit real names, and to substitute assumed ones. With the law of libel looming darkly, the reason is obvious.

The mystic hour of the desert afterglow. A large, square wooden veranda covered by a red and white awning, above a wide silent sweep of flowing river, whose huge rocks, worn smooth through a thousand ages, raised their backs about the stream, a glimpse of green feathery palms and flaming scarlet poinsettias on the island opposite, and beyond the great drab desert, the illimitable waste of stony, undulating sands stretching away to the infinite, and bathed in the blood-red light of the dying day.

"See It's-it's in my kit-bag, over there The thing-the Thing at which the whole world will stand aghast " The thin, white-faced, grey-bearded man lying on his back in bed roused himself with difficulty, and with skinny finger pointed at his strong but battered old leather bag lying in the corner of the small hotel bedroom.