new of.
She gave him explicit instructions for reaching all three, and the
interview ended in an atmosphere of mutual regard and regret. Indeed,
the lady even left her ticket office to follow the gentleman to the door
and watch the departure of his chariot.

Laurie raced in turn to the Varick place and the Kiehl place. Shaw, he
suspected, had probably rented some such place, just as he had rented
the East Side office. But a very cursory inspection of the two old
houses convinced him that they were tenantless. No smoke came from their
chimneys, no sign of life surrounded them; also, he was sure, they were
not sufficiently remote from other houses to suit the mysterious Shaw.

The third house on his list was more promising in appearance, for it
stood austerely remote from its neighbors. But on its soggy lawn two
soiled children and a dog played in care-free abandon, and from the side
of the house came the piercing whistle of an underling cheerily engaged
in sawing wood and shouting cautions to the children. Quite plainly, the
closed-up, shuttered place was in charge of a caretaker, whose offspring
were in temporary possession of its grounds. Laurie inspected other
houses, dozens of them. He made his way into strange, new roads. Nowhere
was there the slightest clue leading to the house he sought.

It was one o'clock in the afternoon when, with an exclamation of actual
anguish, he swung his car around for the return journey to the station.
For the first time the hopelessness of his mission came home to him.
There must be a few hundred houses on the Sound near Sea Cliff. How was
he to find the right one?

Perhaps that girl had thought of some other places, or could direct him
to the best local real-estate agents. Perhaps he should have gone to
them in the first place. He felt dazed, incapable of clear thought.

As the car swerved his eye was caught by something bright lying farther
up the road, in the direction from which he had just turned. For an
instant he disregarded it. Then, on second thought, he stopped the
machine, jumped out, and ran back. There, at the right, by the wayside,
lay a tiny jagged strip of silk that seemed to blush as he stared down
at it.

Slowly he bent, picked it up, and, spreading it across his palm,
regarded it with eyes that unexpectedly were wet. It was a two-inch bit
of the Roman scarf, hacked off, evidently, by the same hurried scissors
that had severed the end in his pocket. He realized