e was a little woman, some eight inches too short for the air she
assumed, fair, good-looking; but with a hard, set mouth. No one had
ever permitted her to forget that she had married margarine.

"You have called about the burglary?" she enquired, in a tone she
might have adopted to a plumber who had come to see to a leak in the
bath.

Malcolm Sage bowed.

"Perhaps you will give me the details," he said. "Kindly be as brief
as possible," his "incipient Bolshevism" manifesting itself in his
manner.

Lady Glanedale elevated her eyebrows; but, as Malcolm Sage's eyes
were not upon her, she proceeded to tell her story.

"About one o'clock this morning I was awakened to find a man in my
bedroom," she began. "He was standing between the bedstead and the
farther window, his face masked. He had a pistol in one hand, which
he pointed towards me, and an electric torch in the other. I sat up
in bed and stared at him. 'If you call out I shall kill you,' he
said. I asked him what he wanted. He replied that if I gave him my
jewel-case and did not call for help, he would not do me any harm.

"Realising that I was helpless, I got out of bed, put on a wrapper,
opened a small safe I have set in the wall, and handed him one of
the two jewel-cases I possess.

"He then made me promise that I would not ring or call out for a
quarter of an hour, and he disappeared out of the window.

"At the end of a quarter of an hour I summoned help, and my stepson,
the butler, and several other servants came to my room. We
telephoned for the police, and after breakfast we telephoned to the
insurance company."

For fully a minute there was silence. Malcolm Sage decided that
Lady Glanedale certainly possessed the faculty of telling a story
with all the events in their proper sequence. He found himself with
very few questions to put to her.

"Can you describe the man?" he asked as he mechanically turned over
the leaves of a book on a table beside him.

"Not very well," she replied. "I saw little more than a silhouette
against the window. He was of medium height, slight of build and I
should say young."

"That seems to agree with the description of the man who robbed Mrs.
Comminge," he said as if to himself.

"That is what the inspector said," remarked Lady Glanedale.

"His voice?"

"Was rather husky, as if he were trying to disguise it."

"Was it the voice of a man of refinement or otherwise?"

"I should describe it as middle-class," was