en her little square window and stuck out into the moonlit
court a dishevelled gray head.

"Il n'est pas la." she said again, beaming upon Richard Hartley, whom
she liked, and, when he protested that he had a definite and important
appointment with her lodger, went on to explain that Ste. Marie had gone
out, doubtless to lunch, before one o'clock and had never returned.

"He may have left word for me up-stairs," Hartley said; "I'll go up and
wait, if I may." So the woman got him her extra key, and he went up, let
himself into the flat, and made lights there.

Naturally he found no word, but his own note of that morning lay spread
out upon a table where Ste. Marie had left it, and so he knew that his
friend was in possession of the two facts he had learned about Stewart.
He made himself comfortable with a book and some cigarettes, and settled
down to wait.

Ste. Marie out at La Lierre, with a bullet-hole in his leg, was deep in
a drugged sleep just then, but Hartley waited for him, looking up now
and then from his book with a scowl of impatience, until the little
clock on the mantel said that it was one o'clock. Then he went home in a
very bad temper, after writing another note and leaving it on the table,
to say that he would return early in the morning.

But in the morning he began to be alarmed. He questioned the concierge
very closely as to Ste. Marie's movements on the day previous, but she
could tell him little, save to mention the brief visit of a man with an
accent of Toulouse or Marseilles, and there seemed to be no one else to
whom he could go. He spent the entire morning in the flat, and returned
there after a hasty lunch. But at mid-afternoon he took a fiacre at the
corner of the Gardens and drove to the rue du Faubourg St. Honore.

Captain Stewart was at home. He was in a dressing-gown, and still looked
fagged and unwell. He certainly betrayed some surprise at sight of his
visitor, but he made Hartley welcome at once and insisted upon having
cigars and things to drink brought out for him. On the whole he
presented an astonishingly normal exterior, for within him he must have
been cold with fear, and in his ears a question must have rung and
shouted and rung again unceasingly--"What does this fellow know? What
does he know?"

Hartley's very presence there had a perilous look.

The younger man shook his head at the servant who asked him what he
wished to drink.

"Thanks, you're very good," he said to