ntary silence.

"What a horrible-looking man!" said Billie, breaking it with a little
gasp. Jno. Peters often affected the opposite sex like that at first
sight.

"I beg your pardon?" said Sam absently.

"What a dreadful-looking man! He quite frightened me!"

For some moments Sam sat without speaking. If this had not been one of
his Napoleonic mornings, no doubt the sudden arrival of his old friend,
Mr. Peters, whom he had imagined at his home in Putney packing for his
trip to America, would have suggested nothing to him. As it was, it
suggested a great deal. He had had a brain-wave, and for fully a minute
he sat tingling under its impact. He was not a young man who often had
brain-waves, and, when they came, they made him rather dizzy.

"Who is he?" asked Billie. "He seemed to know you? And who," she
demanded after a slight pause, "is Miss Milliken?"

Sam drew a deep breath.

"It's rather a sad story," he said. "His name is John Peters. He used to
be clerk here."

"But he isn't any longer?"

"No." Sam shook his head. "We had to get rid of him."

"I don't wonder. A man looking like that...."

"It wasn't that so much," said Sam. "The thing that annoyed father was
that he tried to shoot Miss Milliken."

Billie uttered a cry of horror.

"He tried to shoot Miss Milliken!"

"He _did_ shoot her--the third time," said Sam, warming to his work.
"Only in the arm, fortunately," he added. "But my father is rather a
stern disciplinarian and he had to go. I mean, we couldn't keep him
after that."

"Good gracious!"

"She used to be my father's stenographer, and she was thrown a good deal
with Peters. It was quite natural that he should fall in love with her.
She was a beautiful girl, with rather your own shade of hair. Peters is
a man of volcanic passions, and, when, after she had given him to
understand that his love was returned, she informed him one day that she
was engaged to a fellow at Ealing West, he went right off his onion--I
mean, he became completely distraught. I must say that he concealed it
very effectively at first. We had no inkling of his condition till he
came in with the pistol. And, after that ... well, as I say, we had to
dismiss him. A great pity, for he was a good clerk. Still, it wouldn't
do. It wasn't only that he tried to shoot Miss Milliken. The thing
became an obsession with him, and we found that he had a fixed idea that
every red-haired woman who came into the office was the girl who