the beard--that
fierce, curling, red beard!

"They creep to the window and peer out. Fog still thick as soup. Not a
soul, not a sound. Plenty of time.

"Then to get away, to hide till one is sure. Put on the mackintosh. A
man in a yellow mackintosh may have been seen to enter; let him be seen
to go away. In some dark corner or some empty railway carriage take it
off and roll it up. Then make for the office. Wait there for Ellenby.
True as steel, Ellenby; good business man. Be guided by Ellenby."

He flung the brief from him with a laugh.

"Why, there's not a missing link!" he cried. "And to think that not a
fool among us ever thought of it!"

"Everything fitting into its place," I suggested, "except young
Hepworth. Can you see him, from your description of him, sitting down
and coolly elaborating plans for escape, the corpse of the murdered man
stretched beside him on the hearthrug?"

"No," he answered. "But I can see her doing it, a woman who for week
after week kept silence while we raged and stormed at her, a woman who
for three hours sat like a statue while old Cutbush painted her to a
crowded court as a modern Jezebel, who rose up from her seat when that
sentence of fifteen years' penal servitude was pronounced upon her with
a look of triumph in her eyes, and walked out of court as if she had
been a girl going to meet her lover.

"I'll wager," he added, "it was she who did the shaving. Hepworth
would have cut him, even with a safety-razor."

"It must have been the other one, Martin," I said, "that she loathed.
That almost exultation at the thought that he was dead," I reminded him.

"Yes," he mused. "She made no attempt to disguise it. Curious there
having been that likeness between them." He looked at his watch. "Do
you care to come with me?" he said.

"Where are you going?" I asked him.

"We may just catch him," he answered. "Ellenby and Co."

* * *

The office was on the top floor of an old-fashioned house in a
cul-de-sac off the Minories. Mr. Ellenby was out, so the lanky
office-boy informed us, but would be sure to return before evening; and
we sat and waited by the meagre fire till, as the dusk was falling, we
heard his footsteps on the creaking stairs.

He halted a moment in the doorway, recognising us apparently without
surprise; and then, with a hope that we had not been kept waiting long,
he led the way into an inner room.

"I do no