to return his gaze, Mrs Verloc murmured:

"Going on! What _is_ going on?"

"Why, the affair I came to talk about a little with your husband."

That day Mrs Verloc had glanced at a morning paper as usual. But she had
not stirred out of doors. The newsboys never invaded Brett Street. It
was not a street for their business. And the echo of their cries
drifting along the populous thoroughfares, expired between the dirty
brick walls without reaching the threshold of the shop. Her husband had
not brought an evening paper home. At any rate she had not seen it. Mrs
Verloc knew nothing whatever of any affair. And she said so, with a
genuine note of wonder in her quiet voice.

Chief Inspector Heat did not believe for a moment in so much ignorance.
Curtly, without amiability, he stated the bare fact.

Mrs Verloc turned away her eyes.

"I call it silly," she pronounced slowly. She paused. "We ain't
downtrodden slaves here."

The Chief Inspector waited watchfully. Nothing more came.

"And your husband didn't mention anything to you when he came home?"

Mrs Verloc simply turned her face from right to left in sign of negation.
A languid, baffling silence reigned in the shop. Chief Inspector Heat
felt provoked beyond endurance.

"There was another small matter," he began in a detached tone, "which I
wanted to speak to your husband about. There came into our hands
a--a--what we believe is--a stolen overcoat."

Mrs Verloc, with her mind specially aware of thieves that evening,
touched lightly the bosom of her dress.

"We have lost no overcoat," she said calmly.

"That's funny," continued Private Citizen Heat. "I see you keep a lot of
marking ink here--"

He took up a small bottle, and looked at it against the gas-jet in the
middle of the shop.

"Purple--isn't it?" he remarked, setting it down again. "As I said, it's
strange. Because the overcoat has got a label sewn on the inside with
your address written in marking ink."

Mrs Verloc leaned over the counter with a low exclamation.

"That's my brother's, then."

"Where's your brother? Can I see him?" asked the Chief Inspector
briskly. Mrs Verloc leaned a little more over the counter.

"No. He isn't here. I wrote that label myself."

"Where's your brother now?"

"He's been away living with--a friend--in the country."

"The overcoat comes from the country. And what's the name of the
friend?"

"Michaelis," confessed Mrs Verloc in an awed whi