ced myself in the position of first friend to a family with which I
had had only professional relations; I had even enlisted Edith, when my
acquaintance with Margery Fleming was only three days old! And at the
thought of the girl, of Wardrop's inefficiency and my own hopelessness,
I groaned aloud.

I had not heard the door open.

"I forgot to tell you that a gentleman was here half a dozen times
to-day to see you. He didn't give any name."

I dropped my hands. From around the door Hawes' nervous eye was winking
wildly.

"You're not sick, Mr. Knox?"

"Never felt better."

"I thought I heard--"

"I was singing," I lied, looking him straight in the eye.

He backed nervously to the door.

"I have a little sherry in my office, Mr. Knox--twenty-six years in the
wood. If you--"

"For God's sake, Hawes, there's nothing the matter with me!" I
exclaimed, and he went. But I heard him stand a perceptible time outside
the door before he tiptoed away.

Almost immediately after, some one entered the waiting-room, and the
next moment I was facing, in the doorway, a man I had never seen before.

He was a tall man, with thin, colorless beard trimmed to a Vandyke
point, and pale eyes blinking behind glasses. He had a soft hat crushed
in his hand, and his whole manner was one of subdued excitement.

"Mr. Knox?" he asked, from the doorway.

"Yes. Come in."

"I have been here six times since noon," he said, dropping rather than
sitting in a chair. "My name is Lightfoot. I am--was--Mr. Fleming's
cashier."

"Yes?"

"I was terribly shocked at the news of his death," he stumbled on,
getting no help from me. "I was in town and if I had known in time I
could have kept some of the details out of the papers. Poor Fleming--to
think he would end it that way."

"End it?"

"Shoot himself." He watched me closely.

"But he didn't," I protested. "It was not suicide, Mr. Lightfoot.
According to the police, it was murder."

His cold eyes narrowed like a cat's. "Murder is an ugly word, Mr. Knox.
Don't let us be sensational. Mr. Fleming had threatened to kill himself
more than once; ask young Wardrop. He was sick and despondent; he left
his home without a word, which points strongly to emotional insanity. He
could have gone to any one of a half dozen large clubs here, or at the
capital. Instead, he goes to a little third-rate political club, where,
presumably, he does his own cooking and hides in a dingy room. Is that
sane? Murder