valanced bed and shelves, cheap though the material was, showed a woman's
very friendly care. When he lived in that house there were no such
little attentions paid to him! It was his experience that where such
attentions went something else went with them. A sensualist himself, it
was not conceivable to him that men and women could be under the same
roof without "passages of sympathetic friendship and tokens of affinity."
That was a phrase he had frequently used when pursuing his own sort of
happiness.

His swift scrutiny showed that Crozier's wife had no habitation here, and
that gave him his cue for what the French call "the reconstruction of the
crime." It certainly was clear that, as he had suggested at the Logan
Trial, there was serious trouble in the Crozier family of two, and the
offender must naturally be the man who had flown, not the woman who had
stayed. Here was circumstantial evidence.

His suggestive glance, the look in his eyes, did not escape Crozier, who
read it all aright; and a primitive expression of natural antipathy
passed across his mediaeval face, making it almost inquisitorial.

"Will you care to sit?" he said, however, with the courtesy he could
never avoid; and he pointed to a chair beside the little table in the
centre of the room. As Burlingame sat down he noticed on the table a
crumpled handkerchief. It had lettering in the corner. He spread it out
slightly with his fingers, as though abstractedly thinking of what he was
about to say. The initial in the corner was K. Kitty had left it on the
table while she was talking to Mrs. Crozier a halfhour before. Whatever
Burlingame actually thought or believed, he could not now resist picking
up the handkerchief and looking at it with a mocking smile. It was too
good a chance to waste. He still hugged to his evil heart the