found myself looking curiously at a
photograph in a silver frame on the bed-side table. It was the picture
of a girl in white, with her hands clasped loosely before her. Against
the dark background her figure stood out slim and young. Perhaps it was
the rather grim environment, possibly it was my mood, but although as a
general thing photographs of young girls make no appeal to me, this one
did. I found my eyes straying back to it. By a little finesse I even
made out the name written across the corner, "Alison."

Mr. Gilmore lay back among his pillows and listened to the nurse's
listless voice. But he was watching me from under his heavy eyebrows,
for when the reading was over, and we were alone, he indicated the
picture with a gesture.

"I keep it there to remind myself that I am an old man," he said. "That
is my granddaughter, Alison West."

I expressed the customary polite surprise, at which, finding me
responsive, he told me his age with a chuckle of pride. More surprise,
this time genuine. From that we went to what he ate for breakfast
and did not eat for luncheon, and then to his reserve power, which at
sixty-five becomes a matter for thought. And so, in a wide circle, back
to where we started, the picture.

"Father was a rascal," John Gilmore said, picking up the frame. "The
happiest day of my life was when I knew he was safely dead in bed and
not hanged. If the child had looked like him, I--well, she doesn't.
She's a Gilmore, every inch. Supposed to look like me."

"Very noticeably," I agreed soberly.

I had produced the notes by that time, and replacing the picture Mr.
Gilmore gathered his spectacles from beside it. He went over the four
notes methodically, examining each carefully and putting it down before
he picked up the next. Then he leaned back and took off his glasses.

"They're not so bad," he said thoughtfully. "Not so bad. But I never saw
them before. That's my unofficial signature. I am inclined to think--"
he was speaking partly to himself--"to think that he has got hold of
a letter of mine, probably to Alison. Bronson was a friend of her
rapscallion of a father."

I took Mr. Gilmore's deposition and put it into my traveling-bag with
the forged notes. When I saw them again, almost three weeks later, they
were unrecognizable, a mass of charred paper on a copper ashtray. In the
interval other and bigger things had happened: the Bronson forgery case
had shrunk beside the greater and more immi