and very feeble.

With this preface I come to the death of Arthur Wells, our
acquaintance and neighbor, and the investigation into that death by
a group of six earnest people who call themselves the Neighborhood
Club.

********

The Neighborhood Club was organized in my house. It was too small
really to be called a club, but women have a way these days of
conferring a titular dignity on their activities, and it is not
so bad, after all. The Neighborhood Club it really was, composed
of four of our neighbors, my wife, and myself.

We had drifted into the habit of dining together on Monday evenings
at the different houses. There were Herbert Robinson and his sister
Alice--not a young woman, but clever, alert, and very alive;
Sperry, the well-known heart specialist, a bachelor still in spite
of much feminine activity; and there was old Mrs. Dane, hopelessly
crippled as to the knees with rheumatism, but one of those glowing
and kindly souls that have a way of being a neighborhood nucleus.
It was around her that we first gathered, with an idea of forming
for her certain contact points with the active life from which she
was otherwise cut off. But she gave us, I am sure, more than we
brought her, and, as will be seen later, her shrewdness was an
important element in solving our mystery.

In addition to these four there were my wife and myself.