with a casual nod.

"Hello, Wynn, you've been in the wars, eh? I've seen Freeman. He says
you were just about at the last gasp when he got hold of you, and is
pluming himself no end on having brought you through so well."

"So he ought!" I conceded cordially. "He's a jolly good sort, and it
would have been all up with me in another few hours. Though how on earth
he could fix on me as Cassavetti's murderer, I can't imagine. It's a
fool business, anyhow."

"H'm--yes, I suppose so," drawled Southbourne, in that exasperatingly
deliberate way of his. "But I think you must blame--or thank--me for
that!"

CHAPTER XXV

SOUTHBOURNE'S SUSPICIONS

"You! What had you to do with it?" I ejaculated.

"Well, Freeman was hunting on a cold scent; yearning to arrest some one,
as they always do in a murder case. He'd thought of you, of course.
Considering that you were on the spot at the time, I wonder he didn't
arrest you right off; but he had formed his own theory, as detectives
always do, and in nine cases out of ten they're utterly wrong!"

"Do you know what the theory was?" I asked.

"Yes. He believed that the murder was committed by a woman; simply
because a woman must have helped to ransack the rooms during
Cassavetti's absence."

"How did he know that?"

"How did you know it?" he counter-queried.

"Because he told me at the time that a woman had been in the rooms,
but he wouldn't say any more, except that she was red-haired, or
fair-haired, and well dressed. I wondered how he knew that, but he
wouldn't tell me."

"He has never told me," Southbourne said complacently. "Though I guessed
it, all the same, and he couldn't deny it, when I asked him. She dropped
hairpins about, or a hairpin rather,--women always do when they're
agitated,--an expensive gilt hairpin. That's how he knew she was
certainly fair-haired, and probably well dressed."

I remembered how, more than once, I had picked up and restored to Anne
a hairpin that had fallen from her glorious hair. Jim and Mary Cayley
had often chaffed her about the way she shed her hairpins around.

"What sort of hairpins?" I asked.

"A curved thing. He showed it me when I bowled him out about them. I
know the sort. My wife wears them,--patent things, warranted not to fall
out, so they always do. They cost half a crown a packet in that
quality."

I knew the sort, too, and knew also that my former suspicion was now a
certainty. Anne had been to Cassavetti's roo