ey're doing things in their
own way, as usual."

"Just so," assented Fullaway. "Well, it's an odd thing to me that nobody
comes forward to make some sort of a shot at that reward! Most
extraordinary that the man of the Eastbourne Terrace affair should have
been able to get clean away without anybody in London having seen him--or
at any rate that the people who must have seen him are unable to connect
him with the murder of that woman. Extraordinary!"

"It's all extraordinary," said Allerdyke. He took up a newspaper which
Fullaway had thrown down and began to talk of some subject that caught
his eye, until Fullaway rose, pleaded business, and went off to his rooms
upstairs. When he had gone Allerdyke reconsidered matters. So Fullaway
had been out the night before, had he--dining out, and at a theatre?
Then, of course, it would be quite midnight before he got in. Therefore,
presumably, he did not know that his secretary was about his rooms--and
entering and leaving another suite close by. No--Fullaway knew
nothing--that seemed certain.

The remembrance of what he had seen sent Allerdyke, as soon as he had
breakfasted, to the hall of the hotel, and to the register of guests.
There was no one at the register at that moment, and he turned the pages
at his leisure until he came to what he wanted. And there it was--in
plain black and white--

NUMBER 53. MR. JOHN VAN KOON. NEW YORK CITY, U.S.A.

CHAPTER XXI

THE YOUNG MAN WHO LED PUGS

Allerdyke, with a gesture peculiar to him, thrust his hands in the
pockets of his trousers, strolled away from the desk on which the
register lay open, and going over to the hall door stood there a while,
staring out on the tide of life that rolled by, and listening to the
subdued rattle of the traffic in its ceaseless traverse of the Strand.
And as he stood in this apparently idle and purposeless lounging
attitude, he thought--thought of a certain birthday of his, a good thirty
years before, whereon a kind, elderly aunt had made him a present of a
box of puzzles. There were all sorts of puzzles in that box--things that
you had to put together, things that had to be arranged, things that had
to be adjusted. But there was one in particular which had taken his
youthful fancy, and had at the same time tried his youthful temper--a
shallow tray wherein were a vast quantity of all sorts and sizes of bits
of wood, gaily coloured. There were quite a hundred of those bits, and
you had to