side of the street! Then, in a flash, I understood. He was
following me!

It is difficult to describe the shock that ran through me, that left
me numbed and helpless. For an instant, I stumbled on, half-dazed;
then, gradually, my self-control came back, and with it a certain
fierce joy, a hot exultation. Here, at last, was something definite,
tangible, a clew ready to my hand, if only I were clever enough to
follow it up; a ray of light in the darkness! I could feel my cheeks
burning, and my heart leaping at the thought!

But what had been his part in the affair? For a moment, I groped
blindly in the dark, but only for a moment. Whatever his share in the
tragedy, he had plainly been left behind to watch us; to make sure
that we did not follow the fugitives; to warn them in case of danger.
I understood, now, his solicitude for Miss Holladay--"in her I take
such an interest!" It was important that he should know the moment we
discovered her absence. And he had known; he knew that I was even at
this moment commencing the search for her. My cheeks reddened at the
thought of my indiscreetness; yet he was a man to command confidence.
Who would have suspected him? And an old proverb which he had repeated
one evening, flashed through my mind:

"Folle est la brebis qui au loup se confesse."

"Silly is the sheep who to the wolf herself confesses," I had
translated it, with that painful literalness characteristic of the
beginner. Well, I had been the sheep, and silly enough, Heaven knows!

I had reached Broadway, and at the corner I paused to look at a
display of men's furnishings in a window. Far down the street, on the
other side, almost lost in the hurrying crowd, Martigny was buying a
paper of a newsboy. He shook it out and looked quickly up and down its
columns, like a man who is searching for some special item of news.
Perhaps he _was_ a speculator; perhaps, after all, I was deceiving
myself in imagining that he was following me. I had no proof of it; it
was the most natural thing in the world that he should be in this part
of the town. I must test the theory before accepting it. It was time I
grew wary of theories.

I entered the store, and spent ten minutes looking at some neckties.
When I came out again, Martigny was just getting down from a
bootblack's chair across the street. His back was toward me, and I
watched him get out his little purse and drop a dime into the
bootblack's hand. I went on up Broadway, loiter