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Rh "Will you come round with me and see?" Mr. Barnes demanded eagerly. "It wouldn't take you long. You're welcome to see everything there is there."

Wrayson called for the bill.

"Very well," he said, "we will take a hansom round there at once."

They left the place a few minutes later, and drove to Battersea.

"There's a quarter to run, the landlord says, so I'm staying here," Barnes explained, as he unlocked the front door. "I can't afford a servant or anything of that sort of course, but I shall just sleep here."

The rooms had a ghostly and unkempt appearance. The atmosphere of the sitting-room was stuffy and redolent of stale tobacco smoke. Wrayson's first action was to throw open the window.

"There isn't a sign of a paper anywhere, except in that desk," the young man remarked. "You'll find things in a mess, but whatever was there is there now. I've destroyed nothing."

Wrayson seated himself before the desk, and began a careful search. There were restaurant bills without number, and a variety of ladies' cards, more or less soiled. There were Empire and Alhambra programmes, a bundle of racing wires, and an account from a bookmaker showing a small debit balance. There were other miscellaneous bills, a plaintive epistle from a lady signing herself Flora, and begging for the loan of a fiver for a week, and an invitation to tea from a spinster who called herself Poppy. Amongst all this mass of miscellaneous documents there were only three which Wrayson laid on one side for further consideration. One of these was a note, dated from the Adelphi a few days