e when it was rather
beyond his means; today when he could well afford to live where he would
in New York, he found that his rooms had become a habit with him. He had
no intention whatever of leaving them until the house should be
dismantled to make way for some more modern structure--like that going
up in the rear--or until he married.

He poked round, renewing acquaintance with old, familiar things,
unearthed an ancient pipe which had lain in one of his desk-drawers like
a buried bone, fondled it lovingly, filled and lighted it, and felt all
the time more and more content and at ease.

Then Shultz knocked at the door and delivered to him a bundle of
afternoon papers for which he had filed a requisition immediately on his
arrival.

He sat down, enjoying his pipe to the utmost and wondering how under the
sun he had managed to worry along without it all the time he had been
away, and began to read what the reporters had to say about the arrival
of the Autocratic and the case of the Cadogan collar.

In the main they afforded him little but amusement; the stories were
mostly a hash of misinformation strongly flavoured with haphazard
guesswork. The salient facts of the almost simultaneous disappearance of
the necklace and Mr. Iff stood up out of the welter of surmise like
mountain peaks above cloud-rack. There were no other facts. And both
these remained inexplicable. No trace had been found of Mr. Iff; his
luggage remained upon the pier, unclaimed. With him the Cadogan collar
had apparently vanished as mysteriously: thus the consensus. The
representative of the Secret Service bent on exposing an impostor, the
Pinkerton men employed by the steamship company, and a gratuitous corps
of city detectives were verbally depicted as so many determined
bloodhounds nosing as many different scents--otherwise known as clues.

Jules Max, moreover, after a conference with his star, had published an
offer of a reward of $10,000 for the return of the necklace or for
information leading to its recovery whether or not involving the
apprehension of the thief.

Several of the papers "ran" unusually long stories descriptive of the
scenes on the pier. Staff chuckled over them. The necklace had, in fact,
made no end of trouble for several hundred putatively innocent and
guileless passengers. The customs examination had been thorough beyond
parallel. Not even the steerage and second-cabin passengers had escaped;
everybody's belongings had b