"At three o'clock," he repeated.

For a moment they stood with their arms around each other, then tenderly
his visitor kissed him, and went out. He remained looking after her
vacantly until the chug-chug of her automobile, as it moved off down the
road, was lost in the distance, then turned again to the long
work-table.




VIII

MISS THORNE AND NOT MISS THORNE


From a pleasant, wide-open bay-window of her apartments on the second
floor, Miss Thorne looked out upon the avenue with inscrutable eyes.
Behind the closely drawn shutters of another bay-window, farther down
the avenue, on the corner, she knew a man named Hastings was hiding; she
knew that for an hour or more he had been watching her as she wrote. In
the other direction, in a house near the corner, another man named Blair
was similarly ensconced, and he, too, had been watching as she wrote.
There should be a third man, Johnson. Miss Thorne curiously studied the
face of each passer-by, seeking therein something to remember.

She sat at the little mahogany desk and a note with the ink yet wet
upon it lay face up before her. It was addressed to Signor Pietro
Petrozinni in the district prison, and read: