I did then what might seem to be a callous thing.  I left them all crowding around the body of the dead man.  I let even Felicia be led back to her room by her companion.  I took the lift downstairs, and I made my way into the cafe.

“Where is Louis?” I asked the first waiter I saw.

“He is away for a minute or two, sir,” the man answered.

Almost as he spoke Louis entered from the further end of the restaurant.  He did not see me, and I noticed that his fingers were arranging his tie, and that as he passed a mirror he glanced at his shirt-front.  When I came face to face with him he was breathing fast as though he had been running.

“Louis,” I said, “five flights of stairs are trying at our time of life!”

He looked at me blankly, and as one who does not comprehend.

“Five flights of stairs, monsieur!” he repeated.

I nodded.

“I myself came down by the lift,” I said.  “Louis, Delora is lying in the corridor outside his rooms with a bullet through his forehead.  I am wondering whether he shot himself, or whether—­”

“Or whether what?” Louis asked softly.

I shrugged my shoulders.

“After all,” I said, “I suppose the truth will come out.  Have you any idea, I wonder, where those two hundred thousand pounds are?”

“I, monsieur!”—­Louis held out his hands.  “Delora has had several hours to dispose of them.  If he had taken my advice he would have been flying to the south coast in his motor by now.  As to the money, well, it may be anywhere”

“It may, Louis!” I admitted.

“Delora was a bungler,” Louis said slowly.  “The game was in his hands.  Even the reappearance of his brother was not serious.  He was carrying out a perfectly legitimate transaction in which no one could interfere.”

“Excepting,” I remarked, “that he proposed to retain the proceeds of this sale of his.”

“That would have been hard to prove if he had chosen to assert the contrary,” Louis remarked.  “Vanhallon would have had little enough to say if the money had passed into his hands.”

“And the Chinese ambassador?” I remarked.

“His documents would have been good enough,” Louis replied.  “He has the ships.  He has value for his money.  There was no need for Delora to have despaired.  His behavior during this last hour has been the behavior of a child.  Monsieur will pardon me!”

Louis glided away, and I saw him smilingly escorting a party of late guests to their places.  I stood where I was and watched him.  To me, the man was something amazing!  I firmly believed, even at that moment, that he had, safely hidden, part, if not the whole, of the proceeds of this gigantic scheme of fraud.  I believed, too, that his had been the hand which had killed Delora.  And there he was, within a few minutes of the time when the tragedy had happened, waiting upon his guests, consulted about the vintages of wines, suggesting dishes!  Upstairs Delora lay, with a little blue mark upon his temple!  It was the survival of the fittest, this, in crime as well as in the other things of life!