, he has at
least common-sense."

She looked at him with a touch of the old horror in her
coldly-questioning eyes.

"In your way you have been kind to me," she admitted. "Let me in return
give you a word of advice. Let me beg you to have nothing whatever to
do with my father, in friendship or in enmity. Either might be equally
disastrous. Either, in the long run, is likely to cost you dear."

"If that is your opinion of your father, why do you live with him?" he
asked.

She had become entirely callous again. Her smile, with its mocking
quality, reminded him for a moment of the man whom they were discussing.

"Because I am a luxury and comfort-loving parasite," she answered
deliberately, "because my father gladly pays my accounts at Lucille and
Worth and Reville, because I have never learnt to do without things.
And please remember this. My father, so far as I am concerned, has no
faults. He is a generous and courteous companion. Nevertheless, number
70 b, Curzon Street is no place for people who desire to lead normal
lives."

And with that she was gone. Her gesture of dismissal was so complete
and final that he had no courage for further argument. He had lost her
almost as soon as he had found her.

CHAPTER XIII

Four men were discussing the verdict at the adjourned inquest upon
Victor Bidlake, at Soto's American Bar about a fortnight later. They
were Robert Fairfax, a young actor in musical comedy, Peter Jacks, a
cinema producer, Gerald Morse, a dress designer, and Sidney Voss, a
musical composer and librettist, all habitues of the place and members
of the little circle towards which the dead man had seemed, during the
last few weeks of his life, to have become attracted. At a table a short
distance away, Francis Ledsam was seated with a cocktail and a dish of
almonds before him. He seemed to be studying an evening paper and to be
taking but the scantiest notice of the conversation at the bar.

"It just shows," Peter Jacks declared, "that crime is the easiest
game in the world. Given a reasonable amount of intelligence, and a
murderer's business is about as simple as a sandwich-man's."

"The police," Gerald Morse, a pale-faced, anaemic-looking youth,
declared, "rely upon two things, circumstantial evidence and motive. In
the present case there is no circumstantial evidence, and as to motive,
poor old Victor was too big a fool to have an enemy in the world."

Sidney Voss, who was up for the Sherida