In the cool blue the lemon tint of the lamps had already begun to flame, and as Rupert and I passed them, Rupert talking excitedly, one after another the pale sparks sprang out of the dusk.

Rupert was talking excitedly because he was trying to prove to me the nine hundred and ninety-ninth of his amateur detective theories.

He would go about London, with this mad logic in his brain, seeing a conspiracy in a cab accident, and a special providence in a falling fusee.

His suspicions at the moment were fixed upon an unhappy milkman who walked in front of us.

So arresting were the incidents which afterwards overtook us that I am really afraid that I have forgotten what were the main outlines of the milkman's crime.