He remembered, too, how seven months after that first meeting Stimson
of the Central Office had brought her to Headquarters, fresh from
Paris, involved in some undecipherable way in an Aix-les-Bains diamond
robbery. The despatches had given his office very little to work on,
and she had smiled at his thunderous grillings and defied his noisy
threats. But as she sat there before him, chic and guarded, with her
girlishly frail body so arrogantly well gowned, she had in some way
touched his lethargic imagination. She showed herself to be of finer
and keener fiber than the sordid demireps with whom he had to do.
Shimmering and saucy and debonair as a polo pony, she had seemed a
departure from type, something above the meretricious termagants round
whom he so often had to weave his accusatory webs of evidence.

Then, the following autumn, she was still again mysteriously involved
in the Sheldon wire-tapping coup. This Montreal banker named Sheldon,
from whom nearly two hundred thousand dollars had been wrested, put a
bullet through his head rather than go home disgraced, and she had
straightway been brought down to Blake, for, until the autopsy and the
production of her dupe's letters, Sheldon's death had been looked upon
as a murder.

Blake had locked himself in with the white-faced Miss Elsie Verriner,
alias Chaddy Cravath, alias Charlotte Carruthers, and for three long
hours he had pitted his dynamic brute force against her flashing and
snake-like evasiveness. He had pounded her with the artillery of his
inhumanities. He had beleaguered her with explosive brutishness. He
had bulldozed and harried her into frantic weariness. He had
third-degreed her into cowering and trembling indignation, into hectic
mental uncertainties. Then, with the fatigue point well passed, he had