"I don't know her name, I
don't want to know it."

"You don't know her name?" he repeated, and even in the tumult of their
last farewell her frank and honest denial lingered in his mind.

She did not know the woman's name! Back in his lonely cell Kittredge
pondered this, and reaching for his little volume of De Musset, his
treasured pocket companion that the jailer had let him keep, he opened it
at the fly leaves. _She did not know this woman's name!_ And, wonderingly,
he read on the white page the words and the name written by Alice herself,
scrawlingly but distinctly, the day before in the garden of Notre-Dame.

CHAPTER XIV

THE WOMAN IN THE CASE

Coquenil was neither surprised nor disappointed at the meager results of
Alice's visit to the prison. This was merely one move in the game, and it
had not been entirely vain, since he had learned that Kittredge _might_
have used his left hand in firing a pistol and that he did not suffer with
gout or rheumatism. This last point was of extreme importance.

And the detective was speedily put in excellent humor by news awaiting him
at the Palais de Justice Monday morning that the man sent to London to
trace the burned photograph and the five-pound notes had already met with
success and had telegraphed that the notes in question had been issued to
Addison Wilmott, whose bankers were Munroe and Co., Rue Scribe.

Quick inquiries revealed the fact that Addison Wilmott was a well-known New
Yorker, living in Paris, a man of leisure who was enjoying to the full a
large inherited fortune. He and his dashing wife lived in a private _hotel_
on the Avenue Kleber, where they led a gay existence in the smartest and
most spectacular circle of the American Colony. They gave brilliant
dinners, they had several automobiles, they did all the foolish and
extravagant things that the others did and a few more.

He was dull, good-natured, and a little fat; she was a beautiful woman with
extraordinary charm and a lithe, girlish figure of which she took infinite
care; he was supposed to kick up his heels in a quiet way while she did
the thing brilliantly and kept the wheels of American Colony gossip (busy
enough, anyway) turning and spinning until they groaned in utter weariness.

What was there that Pussy Wilmott had not done or would not do if the
impulse seized her? This was a matter of tireless speculation in the
ultra-chic salons through which this fascinating lady flitted, envied