d how near he
had been to death.

"But you, Mistair Lester," he was saying, "how does it occur that you
also are going to France? I did not know you contemplated----"

"No," I answered calmly, for I had seen that the question was
inevitable and I even welcomed it, since it gave me opportunity to get
my guns to going. "No; the last time I saw you, I didn't contemplate
it, but a good deal has happened since then. Would you care to hear?
Are you strong enough to talk?"

Oh, how I relished tantalizing him!

"I should like very exceedingly to hear," he assured me, and shifted
his position a little, so that his face was in the shadow. "The beams
of light through the shutter make my eyes to hurt," he added.

So he mistrusted himself; so he was not finding the part an easy one,
either! The thought gave me new courage, new audacity.

"You may remember," I began, "that I told you once that if I ever went
to work on the Holladay case, I'd try first to find the murderess. I
succeeded in doing it the very first day."

"Ah!" he breathed. "And after the police had failed! That was, indeed,
remarkable. How did you accomplish it?"

"By the merest chance--by great good fortune. I was making a search of
the French quarter, house by house, when, on Houston Street, I came to
a restaurant, the Cafe Jourdain. A bottle of superieur set Jourdain's
tongue to wagging; I pretended I wanted a room; he dropped a word, the
merest hint; and, in the end, I got the whole story. It seems there
was not only one woman, there were two."

"Yes?"

"Yes--and a man whose name was Betuny or Bethune, or something like
that. But I didn't pay much attention to him--he doesn't figure in the
case. He didn't even go away with the women. The very day I set out on
my search, he was picked up on the streets somewhere suffering with
apoplexy and taken to a hospital, so nearly dead that it was a
question whether he would recover. So he's out of it. The Jourdains
told me that the women had sailed for France."

"You will pardon me," said my hearer, "but in what way did you make
sure that they were the women you desired?"

"By the younger one's resemblance to Miss Holladay," I answered, lying
with a glibness which surprised myself. "The Jourdains maintained that
a photograph of Miss Holladay was really one of their lodger."

I heard him draw a deep breath, but he kept his face under admirable
control.

"Ah, yes," he said. "That was exceedingly clever. I shou