e conversant. I do not need
to say anything about what has followed the sending of that Marconi."

"But I am going to say something about your work in this matter, Miss
Strange. The big detectives about here will have to look sharp if--"

"Don't, please! Not yet." A smile softened the asperity of this
interruption. "The man has yet to be caught and identified. Till that is
done I cannot enjoy any one's congratulations. And you will see that all
this may not be so easy. If no one happened to meet the desperate wretch
before he had an opportunity to retie his shoe-laces, there will be
little for you or even for the police to go upon but his wounded foot,
his undoubtedly carefully prepared alibi, and later, a woman's confused
description of a face seen but for a moment only and that under a
personal excitement precluding minute attention. I should not be
surprised if the whole thing came to nothing."

But it did not. As soon as the description was received from Mrs. Amidon
(a description, by the way, which was unusually clear and precise, owing
to the peculiar and contradictory features of the man), the police were
able to recognize him among the many suspects always under their eye.
Arrested, he pleaded, just as Miss Strange had foretold, an alibi of
a seemingly unimpeachable character; but neither it, nor the plausible
explanation with which he endeavoured to account for a freshly healed
scar amid the callouses of his right foot, could stand before Mrs.
Amidon's unequivocal testimony that he was the same man she had seen in
Mrs. Doolittle's upper room on the afternoon of her own happiness and of
that poor woman's murder.

The moment when, at his trial, the two faces again confronted each other
across a space no wider than that which had separated them on the dread
occasion in Seventeenth Street, is said to have been one of the most
dramatic in the annals of that ancient court room.

END OF PROBLEM III

PROBLEM IV. THE GROTTO SPECTRE

Miss Strange was not often pensive--at least not at large functions
or when under the public eye. But she certainly forgot herself at Mrs.
Provost's musicale and that, too, without apparent reason. Had the music
been of a high order one might have understood her abstraction; but it
was of a decidedly mediocre quality, and Violet's ear was much too fine
and her musical sense too cultivated for her to be beguiled by anything
less than the very best.

Nor had she the excuse of a