the house, he ascended a massively
balustraded staircase. The walls were darkly paneled; from the
shadowy recesses pictured faces of men and women looked down at him.

Coming in from the littered street, with its high smells and crowding,
gesticulating people, the house impressed one by its quiet, its
spaciousness, and the evident means and culture of its owner.
Pendleton turned off at the first landing, proceeded along a passage
and finally knocked at a door. Without waiting for a reply, he walked
in.

At the far end of a long, high-ceilinged apartment a young man was
lounging in an easy-chair. At his elbow was a jar of tobacco, a sheaf
of brown cigarette papers and a scattering of books. He lifted a keen
dark face, lit up by singularly brilliant eyes.

"Hello, Pen," greeted he. "You've come just in time to smoke up some
of this Greek tobacco. Throw those books off that chair and make
yourself easy."

One by one Pendleton lifted the books and glanced at the titles.

"Your morning's reading, if this is such," commented he, "is
strikingly catholic. Plutarch, Snarleyow, the Opium Eater, Martin
Chuzzlewit." Then came a host of tattered pamphlets, bound in
shrieking paper covers, which the speaker handled gingerly. "'The
Crimes of Anton Probst,'" he continued to read, "'The Deeds of the
Harper Family,' 'The Murder of ----'" here he paused, tossed the
pamphlets aside with contempt, sat down and drew the tobacco jar
toward him.

"Some of the results of your forays into the basements of old
booksellers, I suppose," he added, rolling a cigarette with delicate
ease. "But what value you see in such things is beyond me."

Ashton-Kirk smiled good-humoredly. He took up some of the pamphlets
and fluttered their illy-printed pages.

"They are not beautiful," he admitted; "the paper could not be worse
and the wood cuts are horrors. But they are records of actual
things--striking things, as a matter of fact--for a murder which so
lifts itself above the thousands of homicides that are yearly
occurring, as to gain a place outside the court records and
newspapers, must have been one of exceptional execution."

"There is a public which delights in being horrified," said Pendleton
with a grimace. "The things are put out to get their nickels and
dimes."

"No doubt," agreed the other. "And the fact that they are willing to
pay their nickels and dimes is, to my way of thinking, a proof of the
extraordinary nature of the crime chr