th her. He certainly could
not do that. And there seemed to be nothing else that--Ste. Marie broke
off this somewhat despondent course of reasoning with a sudden little
voiceless cry. For the first time it occurred to him to connect the
house on the Clamart road and Mlle. Coira O'Hara and young Arthur Benham
(it will be remembered that the man had not yet had time to arrange his
suddenly acquired mass of evidence in logical order and to make
deductions from it), for the first time he began to put two and two
together. Stewart had hidden away his nephew; this nephew was known to
have been much enamoured of the girl Coira O'Hara; Coira O'Hara was said
to be living--with her father, probably--in the house on the outskirts
of Paris, where she was visited by Captain Stewart. Was not the
inference plain enough--sufficiently reasonable? It left, without doubt,
many puzzling things to be explained--perhaps too many; but Ste. Marie
sat forward in his seat, his eyes gleaming, his face tense with
excitement.

"Is young Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road?"

He said the words almost aloud, and he became aware that the fat woman
with a live fowl at her feet and the butcher's boy on his other side
were looking at him curiously. He realized that he was behaving in an
excited manner, and so sat back and lowered his eyes. But over and over
within him the words said themselves--over and over, until they made a
sort of mad, foolish refrain.

"Is Arthur Benham in the house on the Clamart road? Is Arthur Benham in
the house on the Clamart road?" He was afraid that he would say it aloud
once more, and, he tried to keep a firm hold upon himself.

The tram swung into the rue de Sevres, and rolled smoothly out the long,
uninteresting stretch of the rue Lecourbe, far out to where the houses,
became scattered, where mounds and pyramids of red tiles stood alongside
the factory where they had been made, where an acre of little glass
hemispheres in long, straight rows winked and glistened in the afternoon
sun--the forcing-beds of some market gardener; out to the Porte de
Versailles at the city wall, where a group of customs officers sprawled
at ease before their little sentry-box or loafed over to inspect an
incoming tram.

A bugle sounded and a drum beat from the great fosse under the wall, and
a company of piou-pious, red-capped, red-trousered, shambled through
their evolutions in a manner to break the heart of a British or a Germa