"I am sorry I can't tell you," he replied, more civilly. "We get those
pictures by contract. We don't take them ourselves."

"Where are the company's offices?"

"New York." He stepped forward and grasped a super by the shoulder.
"What in blazes are you doing with that gold chair in a kitchen set?
Take that piece of pink plush there and throw it over a soap box, if you
haven't got a kitchen chair."

I had not realized the extent of the shock, but now I dropped into a
chair and wiped my forehead. The unexpected glimpse of Alison West,
followed almost immediately by the revelation of the picture, had left
me limp and unnerved. McKnight was looking at his watch.

"He says the moving picture people have an office down-town. We can make
it if we go now."

So he called a cab, and we started at a gallop. There was no sign of the
detective. "Upon my word," Richey said, "I feel lonely without him."

The people at the down-town office of the cinematograph company were
very obliging. The picture had been taken, they said, at M-, just
two miles beyond the scene of the wreck. It was not much, but it was
something to work on. I decided not to go home, but to send McKnight's
Jap for my clothes, and to dress at the Incubator. I was determined, if
possible, to make my next day's investigations without Johnson. In the
meantime, even if it was for the last time, I would see Her that night.
I gave Stogie a note for Mrs. Klopton, and with my dinner clothes there
came back the gold bag, wrapped in tissue paper.

CHAPTER XVI. THE SHADOW OF A GIRL

Certain things about the dinner at the Dallas house will always be
obscure to me. Dallas was something in the Fish Commission, and I
remember his reeling off fish eggs in billions while we ate our caviar.
He had some particular stunt he had been urging the government to
for years--something about forbidding the establishment of mills and
factories on river-banks--it seems they kill the fish, either the smoke,
or the noise, or something they pour into the water.

Mrs. Dallas was there, I think. Of course, I suppose she must have been;
and there was a woman in yellow: I took her in to dinner, and I remember
she loosened my clams for me so I could get them. But the only real
person at the table was a girl across in white, a sublimated young woman
who was as brilliant as I was stupid, who never by any chance looked
directly at me, and who appeared and disappeared across the candles and