in Daleshire; the fall of which had involved thousands of honest working folk in terrible distress if not in absolute ruin.  Most of them had raked up Ainsworth’s past to considerable journalistic purpose:  it had been an easy matter to turn up old files, to recount the fall of the Hearth and Home, to tell anew the story of the privations of the humble investors whose small hoards had gone in the crash; it had been easy, too, to set out again the history of Ainsworth’s arrest, trial, and fate.  There was plenty of romance in the story:  it was that of a man who by his financial ability had built up a great industrial insurance society; had—­as was alleged—­converted the large sums entrusted to him to his own purposes; had been detected and punished; had disappeared, after his punishment, so effectually that no one knew where he had gone; had come back, comparatively a few years later, under another name, a very rich man, and had entered Parliament and been, in a modest way, a public character without any of those who knew him in his new career suspecting that he had once worn a dress liberally ornamented with the broad arrow.  Fine copy, excellent copy:  some of the morning newspapers made a couple of columns of it.

But the Watchman, up to then easily ahead of all its contemporaries in keeping the public informed of all the latest news in connection with the Marbury affair, contented itself with a brief announcement.  For after Rathbury had left him, Spargo had sought his proprietor and his editor, and had sat long in consultation with them, and the result of their talk had been that all the Watchman thought fit to tell its readers next morning was contained in a curt paragraph: 

“We understand that Mr. Stephen Aylmore, M.P., who is charged with the murder of John Marbury, or Maitland, in the Temple on June 21st last, was yesterday afternoon identified by certain officials as Stephen Ainsworth, who was sentenced to a term of penal servitude in connection with the Hearth and Home Mutual Benefit Society funds nearly thirty years ago.”

Coming down to Fleet Street that morning, Spargo, strolling jauntily along the front of the Law Courts, encountered a fellow-journalist, a man on an opposition newspaper, who grinned at him in a fashion which indicated derision.

“Left behind a bit, that rag of yours, this morning, Spargo, my boy!” he remarked elegantly.  “Why, you’ve missed one of the finest opportunities I ever heard of in connection with that Aylmore affair.  A miserable paragraph!—­why, I worked off a column and a half in ours!  What were you doing last night, old man?”

“Sleeping,” said Spargo and went by with a nod.  “Sleeping!”

He left the other staring at him, and crossed the road to Middle Temple Lane.  It was just on the stroke of eleven as he walked up the stairs to Mr. Elphick’s chambers; precisely eleven as he knocked at the outer door.  It is seldom that outer doors are closed in the Temple at that hour, but Elphick’s door was closed fast enough.  The night before it had been promptly opened, but there was no response to Spargo’s first knock, nor to his second, nor to his third.  And half-unconsciously he murmured aloud:  “Elphick’s door is closed!”