“That was right,” I said, and reflected again upon Godfrey’s exhaustless energy.

I found him lolling in an easy chair, and he looked up with a smile at my entrance.  “Higgins said you hadn’t come in yet,” he explained, “so I thought I’d wait a few minutes on the off chance that you mightn’t be too tired to talk.  If you are, say so, and I’ll be moving along.”

“I’m not too tired,” I said, hanging up my coat.  “I feel a good deal better than I did an hour ago.”

“I saw that you were about all in.”

“How do you keep it up, Godfrey?” I asked, sitting down opposite him.  “You don’t seem tired at all.”

“I am tired, though,” he said, “a little.  But I’ve got a fool brain that won’t let my body go to sleep so long as there is work to be done.  Then, as soon as everything is finished, the brain lets go and the body sleeps like a log.  Now I knew I couldn’t go to sleep properly to-night until I had heard the very interesting theory you are going to confide to me.  Besides, I have a thing or two to tell you.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

“We had a cable from our Paris office just before I left.  It seems that M. Theophile d’Aurelle plays the fiddle in the orchestra of the Cafe de Paris.  He played as usual to-night, so that it is manifestly impossible that he should also be lying in the New York morgue.  Moreover, none of his friends, so far as he knows, is in America.  No doubt he may be able to identify the photograph of the dead man, and we’ve already started one on the way, but we can’t hear from it for six or eight days.  But my guess was right—­the fellow’s name isn’t d’Aurelle.”

“You say you have a photograph?”

“Yes, I had some taken of the body this afternoon.  Here’s one of them.  Keep it; you may have a use for it.”

I took the card, and, as I gazed at the face depicted upon it, I realised that the distorted countenance I had seen in the afternoon had given me no idea of the man’s appearance.  Now the eyes were closed and the features composed and peaceful, but even death failed to give them any dignity.  It was a weak and dissipated face, the face of a hanger-on of cafes, as Parks had said—­of a loiterer along the boulevards, of a man without ambition, and capable of any depth of meanness and deceit.  At least, that is how I read it.

“He’s evidently low-class,” said Godfrey, watching me.  “One of those parasites, without work and without income, so common in Paris.  Shop-girls and ladies’ maids have a weakness for them.”

“I think you are right,” I agreed; “but, at the same time, if he was of that type, I don’t see what business he could have had with Philip Vantine.”

“Neither do I; but there are a lot of other things I don’t see, either.  We’re all in the dark, Lester; have you thought of that?  Absolutely in the dark.”

“Yes, I have thought of it,” I said, slowly.