ith a great
uncut emerald set into its centre. This, too, she opened, and drew
out several sheets of foreign note-paper pinned together at the top.
These she glanced through until she came to the third or fourth.
Then she bent it down and passed it across the table to Laverick.

"You may read that," she said. "It is part of a report which I have
had in my pos session since Wednesday morning."

Laverick drew the sheet towards him and read, in thin, angular
characters, very distinct and plain:

Some ten minutes after the assault, a policeman passed down
the street but did not glance toward the passage. The next
person to appear was a gentleman who left some offices on the
same side as the passage, and walked down evidently on his
homeward way. He glanced up the passage and saw the body
lying there. He disappeared for a moment and struck a match.
A minute afterwards he emerged from the passage, looked up and
down the street, and finding it empty returned to the office
from which he had issued, let himself in with his latchkey,
and closed the door behind him. He was there for about ten
minutes. When he reappeared, he walked quickly down the street
and for obvious reasons I was unable to follow him.

The address of the offices which he left and re-entered was
Messrs. Laverick & Morrison, Stockbrokers.

"That interests you, Mr. Laverick?" she asked softly.

He handed it back to her.

"It interests me very much," he answered. "Who was this unseen
person who wrote from the clouds?"

"I may not tell you all my secrets, Mr. Laverick," she declared.
"What have you done with that twenty thousand pounds?"

Laverick helped himself to champagne. He listened for a moment to
the music, and looked into the wonderful eyes which shone from that
beautiful face a few feet away. Her lips were slightly parted, her
forehead wrinkled. There was nothing of the accuser in her
countenance; a gentle irony was its most poignant expression.

"Is this a fairy tale, Mademoiselle Idiale?"

She shrugged her shoulders.

"It might seem so," she answered. "Sometimes I think that all the
time we live two lives,--the life of which the world sees the
outside, and the life inside of which no one save ourselves knows
anything at all. Look, for instance, at all these people--these
chorus girls and y