person?"

Clive smiled.

"That is a different problem--and a more difficult one," he said
quietly. "These anonymous letters are very often exceedingly hard nuts
to crack. But probably you have someone in your mind's eye already."

"No," said Anstice quickly, moved by a sudden desire to enlist this
man's sympathy and possible help. "I'm completely in the dark. But I
intend to find out who wrote these things. I suppose"--for a second he
hesitated--"I suppose it isn't in your province to give me any possible
clue as to the identity of the writer?"

The other laughed rather dryly.

"I'm not a clairvoyant," he said, "and I can't tell from handling a
letter who wrote it, as the psychometrists profess to be able to do. But
I will tell you one or two points I have noted in connection with these
things." He flicked them rather disdainfully with his finger. "They are
written by a woman--and I should not wonder if that woman were a
foreigner."

"A foreigner?" Anstice was genuinely surprised. "I say, what makes you
think that? The writing is not foreign."

"No. You are right there inasmuch as the regulation writing of a
foreigner, French, Italian, Spanish, is fine and pointed in character,
while this is more round, more sprawling and clumsy. But"--he frowned
thoughtfully, and Anstice thought he looked more like Sherlock Holmes
than ever--"there is one point in connection with this last letter which
has evidently not struck you. Suppose you read it through carefully once
more, and see if you can discover something in it which appears a trifle
un-English, so to speak."

Anstice took the second letter as desired, and read it through
carefully, while Clive watched him with an interest which was not
feigned. Although Anstice had no suspicion of the fact, Clive, who had
travelled in India, had in the light of that letter identified his
visitor directly with the central figure in that bygone tragedy in
Alostan; and although, owing to his absence from England, Clive had not
been one of the experts consulted in the Carstairs case, it was not hard
for him to place the first letter as belonging to that notorious series
of anonymous scrawls which had roused so much interest in the Press a
couple of years before this date.

Just where the connection between the two cases came Clive could not
discover, but he had always felt a curiously strong sympathy with the
unknown man who had carried out a woman's wish just ten minutes too
soon