eering lifted his head with a jerk. "Hood--what Hood?"

"Mr. Hood is all I know, sir. He said he was expected--you had asked him
for the night. If there's a mistake----"

Deering reached for his hat and coat, which Briggs still held. His face
whitened, and the outstretched hand shook visibly. Briggs eyed him with
grave concern, then took a step toward the stairway.

"If you wish, sir----"

"Never mind, Briggs," Deering snapped. "It's all right. I'd forgotten I
had a guest coming; that's all."

He opened a letter with assumed carelessness and held it before his eyes
until the door closed upon Briggs. Then his jaws tightened. He struck his
hands together and mounted the steps doggedly, as though prepared for a
disagreeable encounter.

All the way out on the train he had feared that this might happen. The
long arm of the law was already clutching at his collar, but he had not
reckoned with this quick retribution. The presence of the unknown man in
the house could be explained on no other hypothesis than the discovery of
his theft of two hundred thousand dollars in gilt-edged bonds from the
banking-house of Deering, Gaylord & Co. It only remained for him to kill
himself and escape from the shame that would follow exposure. He must do
this at once, but first he would see who had been sent to apprehend him.
Hood was an unfamiliar name; he had never known a Hood anywhere, he was
confident of that.

The house was ominously quiet. Deering paused when he reached his own
room, glanced down the hall, then opened the door softly, and fell back
with a gasp before the blaze of lights. There, lost in the recesses of a
comfortable chair, with his legs thrown across the mahogany table, sat a
man he had never seen before.

"Ah, Deering; very glad you've come," murmured the stranger, glancing up
unhurriedly from his perusal of a newspaper.

He had evidently been reading for some time, as the floor was littered
with papers. At this instant something in the page before him caught his
attention and he deftly extracted a quarter of a column of text, pinched
it with the scissors' points and dropped it on a pile of similar cuttings
on the edge of the table.

"Just a moment!" he remarked in the tone of a man tolerant of
interruptions, "and do pardon me for mussing up your room. I liked it
better here than in the pink room your man gave me--no place there to put
your legs! Creature of habit; can't rest without sticking my feet up."

H