ferret it out."

"Funny idea, that!" commented young Bawdrey, smiling, and accepting the
proffered hand. "Rum lot of people you must run across in your line, Mr.
Headland. Shouldn't take you for a detective myself, shouldn't even in a
room full of them. College man, aren't you? Thought so. Oxon or Cantab?"

"Cantab--Emmanuel."

"Oh, Lord! Never thought I'd ever live to appeal to an Emmanuel man to
do anything brilliant. I'm an Oxon chap; Brasenose is my alma mater. I
say, Mr. Narkom, do give me a cup of tea, will you? I had to slip off
while the others were at theirs, and I've run all the way. Thanks very
much. Don't mind if I sit in that corner and draw the curtain a little,
do you?" his frank, boyish face suddenly clouding. "I don't want to be
seen by anybody passing. It's a horrible thing to feel that you are
being spied upon, at every turn, Mr. Headland, and that want of caution
may mean the death of the person you love best in all the world."

"Oh, it's that kind of case, is it?" queried Cleek, making room for him
to pass round the table and sit in the corner, with his back to the
window and the loosened folds of the chintz curtain keeping him in the
shadow.

"Yes," answered young Bawdrey, with a half-repressed shudder and a
deeper clouding of his rather pale face. "Sometimes I try to make myself
believe that it isn't, that it's all fancy, that she never could be so
inhuman, and yet how else is it to be explained? You can't go behind the
evidence; you can't make things different simply by saying that you will
not believe." He stirred his tea nervously, gulped down a couple of