the
stock before he boiled coffee and fried eggs for himself.

It was when he went in to cook his belated breakfast that Lite noticed
something which had no logical explanation. There were footprints on
the kitchen floor that he had scrubbed so diligently. He stood looking
at them, much as he had looked at the stain that would not come out, no
matter how hard he scrubbed. He had not gone in the room after he had
pulled the door shut and gone off to water Jean's dowers. He was
positive upon that point; and even if he had gone in, his tracks would
scarcely have led straight across the room to the cupboard where the
table dishes were kept.

The tracks led to the cupboard, and were muddled confusedly there, as
though the maker had stood there for some minutes. Lite could not see
any sense in that. They were very distinct, just as footprints always
show plainly on clean boards. The floor had evidently been moist
still,--Lite had scrubbed man-fashion, with a broom, and had not been
very particular about drying the floor afterwards. Also he had thrown
the water straight out from the door, and the fellow must have stepped
on the moist sand that clung to his boots. In the dark he could not
notice that, or see that he had left tracks on the floor.

Lite went to the cupboard and looked inside it, wondering what the man
could have wanted there. It was one of those old-fashioned "safes"
such as our grandmothers considered indispensable in the furnishing of
a kitchen. It held the table dishes neatly piled: dinner plates at the
end of the middle shelf, smaller plates next, then a stack of
saucers,--the arrangement stereotyped, unvarying since first Lite Avery
had taken dishtowel in hand to dry the dishes for Jean when she was ten
and stood upon a footstool so that her elbows would be higher than the
rim of the dishpan. The cherry-blossom dinner set that had come from
the mail-order house long ago was chipped now and incomplete, but the
familiar rows gave Lite an odd sense of the unreality of the tragedy
that had so lately taken place in that room.

Clearly there was nothing there to tempt a thief, and there was nothing
disturbed. Lite straightened up and looked down thoughtfully upon the
top of the cupboard, where Jean had stacked out-of-date newspapers and
magazines, and where Aleck had laid a pair of extra gloves. He pulled
out the two small drawers just under the cupboard top and looked within
them. The first he