dal in the life of mother or daughter or of any
clandestine love affair on the part of either.

"These briefly are the available facts as compiled by a trustworthy
member of my staff, Assistant District Attorney Horace Wilkes, to whom
I detailed the duty of making a painstaking inquiry. If I may hereafter
be of service to you in this matter or any other matter, kindly command
me. I have the honor to be,

"Yours etc., etc."

With a little gesture of despairful resignation Miss Smith laid the
letter down. Well, there was nothing more she could do; nothing more to
be done. She had come to a blind end. The proof was conclusive of the
worst. But in her thoughts, waking and sleeping, persisted the image of
that gallant, pathetic little figure which she had seen last at the
Peekskill station, bound, helpless, alone and all so courageously facing
what to most of us would be worse than death itself. Awake or in sleep
she could not get it out of her mind.

At length one night following on a day which for the greater part she
had spent in a study of the somewhat curious laws that in New York
State--as well as in divers other states of the Union--govern the
procedure touching certain classes coming within purview of the code,
she awoke in the little hours preceding the dawn to find herself saying
aloud: "There's something wrong--there must be--there has to be!"

Until daylight and after she lay there planning a course of action until
finally she had it completed. True, it was a grasping at feeble straws,
but even so she meant to follow along the only course which seemed open
to her.

First she did some long-distance telephoning. Then immediately after
breakfast she sent to the garage round the corner for her runabout and
in it she rode up through the city and on into Westchester, now
beginning to flaunt the circus colors of a gorgeous Indian summer. An
hour and a half of steady driving brought her to the village of
Pleasantdale. She found it a place well named, seeing that it was tucked
down in a cove among the hills between the Hudson on the one side and
the Sound on the other.

Following the directions given her by a lone policeman on duty in the
tiny public square, she ran two blocks along the main street and drew up
where a window sign giving name and hours advertised that James P.
McGlore, M.D., here professionally received patients in his office on
the lower floor of his place of residence. A maidservant answered th