flinched from the gesture as if it were a blow. "How did you learn
that?"

"A score of things pointed to it from the first," he answered
miserably. "I would have seen the truth long since if--if something
else had not blinded me to it. This morning my eyes were finally
opened--" he fumbled in his pocket with shaking fingers--"by these!"

Miss Ocky took the two telegrams, held them shoulder-high to the light,
and read them wonderingly. She exclaimed sharply over the one from
Kitty Doyle.

"'K. Doyle'! Who is that?"

"A clever woman detective accompanying Janet Mackay--not to New
Orleans, but to Montreal! I already knew her destination before you
attempted to mislead me."

"A detective following Janet!" Her tone was a vigorous protest. "Oh,
you must call her back! It isn't fair to Janet! Promise me you will
call her back!"

"I will, at once. Kitty Doyle's usefulness there--is ended!"

She had raised herself slightly in her eagerness; now she relaxed again
with a sigh of relief. Creighton, a dull ache in his heart, waited for
her to resume the conversation. He would not take the lead.

"So Janet talked in her sleep!" To his horror, Miss Ocky was speaking
in her amused, faintly mocking accents as though nothing mattered less
than this gruesome discussion of how she came to be exposed. "In a
Pullman, too; how very indiscreet! I should have foreseen that and
made her stick to day coaches. I knew her failing!"

"It was a paragraph in one of your books that revealed it to me,"
contributed Creighton gloomily. "You once described a bad night you
spent due to your companion talking in her sleep. That enabled me to
give my operative a tip."

"In one of my own books! The irony of fate, that! Please, Mr.
Creighton, tell me why you happened to have Janet shadowed in the first
place. What had she done to deserve this delicate attention? Is it
possible that you suspected _her_?"

"I most certainly did." Chin cupped in both hands, his eyes fixed on
the floor at his feet, he morosely supplied her with the salient
features of the case as he had come upon them, from the discovery of
the steel chip that pointed to an inside job to the moment when he
learned that only Janet was missing from the house on the occasion of
the monk's final appearance. "Then it developed that she hadn't been
at the theater, as she was supposed to be. I argued from the return of
the notebook that the case was drawing to a cli