iling. The man seemed to have disappeared
as noiselessly and completely as had young Arthur Benham himself. He was
unable even to settle with any definiteness the time of the man's
departure from Paris. Some of O'Hara's old acquaintances maintained that
they had seen the last of him two months before, but a shifty-eyed
person in rather cheaply smart clothes came up to Ste. Marie one evening
in Maxim's and said he had heard that Ste. Marie was making inquiries
about M. O'Hara. Ste. Marie said he was, and that it was an affair of
money; whereupon the cheaply smart individual declared that M. O'Hara
had left Paris six months before to go to the United States of America,
and that he had had a picture postal-card from him, some weeks since,
from New York. The informant accepted an expensive cigar and a Dubonnet
by way of reward, but presently departed into the night, and Ste. Marie
was left in some discouragement, his theory badly damaged.

He spoke of this encounter to Richard Hartley, who came on later to join
him, and Hartley, after an interval of silence and smoke, said: "That
was a lie! The man lied!"

"Name of a dog, why?" demanded Ste. Marie; but the Englishman shrugged
his shoulders.

"I don't know," he said. "But I believe it was a lie. The man came to
you--sought you out to tell his story, didn't he? And all the others
have given a different date? Well, there you are! For some reason, this
man or some one behind him--O'Hara himself, probably--wants you to
believe that O'Hara is in America. I dare say he's in Paris all the
while."

"I hope you're right," said the other. "And I mean to make sure, too. It
certainly was odd, this strange being hunting me out to tell me that. I
wonder, by-the-way, how he knew I'd been making inquiries about O'Hara.
I've questioned only two or three people, and then in the most casual
way. Yes, it's odd."

It was about a week after this--a fruitless week, full of the alternate
brightness of hope and the gloom of disappointment--that he met Captain
Stewart, to whom he had been, more than once, on the point of appealing.
He happened upon him quite by chance one morning in the rue Royale.
Captain Stewart was coming out of a shop, a very smart-looking shop,
devoted, as Ste. Marie, with some surprise and much amusement, observed,
to ladies' hats, and the price of hats must have depressed him, for he
looked in an ill humor, and older and more yellow than usual. But his
face altered sudde