d or France, was of the
slightest. Sometimes, when overexcited by the discovery of some new
and entrancing upland in the domain of art, he had bought or borrowed
a volume of light fiction in order to read himself to sleep, and a
detective figured occasionally in such pages. Usually, the official
was a pig-headed idiot, whose blunders and narrow-mindedness served as
admirable whetstones for the preternaturally sharp intelligence of an
amateur investigator of crime.

Trenholme, like the average reader, did not know that such
self-appointed sleuths are snubbed and despised by Scotland Yard, that
they seldom or never base their fantastic theories on facts, or that,
in fiction, they act in a way which would entail their own speedy
appearance in the dock if practiced in real life. Furneaux came as a
positive revelation. A small, wiry individual who looked like a
comedian and spouted the truisms of the studio, a wizened little
whippersnapper who put hardly one direct question to a prospective
witness, but whose caustic comments had placed a new and vastly
disagreeable aspect on the morning's adventure--such a man to be the
representative of staid and heavy-footed Scotland Yard! Well, wonders
would never cease. It was not for a bewildered artist yet to know that
Furneaux's genius alone excused his eccentricities.

And he, Trenholme, was to meet the girl! He turned to the easel and
looked at the picture. A few hours ago he had reviled the fate that
seemed to forbid their meeting. Now he was to be brought to her,
though somewhat after the fashion of a felon with gyves on his wrists,
since Furneaux's request for the morrow's rendezvous rang ominously
like a command. Indeed, indeed, it was a mad world!

At any rate, he did not, as he had intended, tear the canvas from its
stretcher and apply a match to it in the grate. Thus far, then, had
Furneaux's queer method been justified. He had hit on the one certain
means of restraint on an act of vandalism. The picture now stood
between Trenholme and the scoffing multitude. It was his buckler
against the shafts of innuendo. Rather than lose it before his actions
were vindicated he would suffer the depletion to the last penny of a
not altogether meager bank account.

Of course, this open-souled youngster never dreamed that the detective
had read his style and attributes in one lightning-swift glance of
intuition. Before ever Trenholme was aware of a stranger standing in
the open doorwa