a baleful aura which affects certain highly-strung temperaments
just as the sensation of a wave of cold air rising from the spine to
the head may be a forewarning of epilepsy or hysteria? John Trenholme
had cause to think so one bright June morning in 1912, and he has
never ceased to believe it, though the events which made him an
outstanding figure in the "Strange Case of Mortimer Fenley," as the
murder of a prominent man in the City of London came to be known, have
long since been swept into oblivion by nearly five years of war. Even
the sun became a prime agent of the occult that morning. It found a
chink in a blind and threw a bar of vivid light across the face of a
young man lying asleep in the front bedroom of the "White Horse Inn"
at Roxton. It crept onward from a firm, well-molded chin to lips now
tight set, though not lacking signs that they would open readily in a
smile and perhaps reveal two rows of strong, white, even teeth.
Indeed, when that strip of sunshine touched and warmed them, the
smile came; so the sleeper was dreaming, and pleasantly.

But the earth stays not for men, no matter what their dreams. In a few
minutes the radiant line reached the sleeper's eyes, and he awoke.
Naturally, he stared straight at the disturber of his slumbers; and
being a mere man, who emulated not the ways of eagles, was routed at
the first glance.

More than that, he was thoroughly aroused, and sprang out of bed with
a celerity that would have given many another young man a headache
during the remainder of the day.

But John Trenholme, artist by profession, was somewhat of a
light-hearted vagabond by instinct; if the artist was ready to be
annoyed because of an imaginary loss of precious daylight, the
vagabond laughed cheerily when he blinked at a clock and learned that
the hour still lacked some minutes of half past five in the morning.

"By gad," he grinned, pulling up the blind, "I was scared stiff. I
thought the blessed alarm had missed fire, and that I had been lying
here like a hog during the best part of the finest day England has
seen this year."

Evidently he was still young enough to deal in superlatives, for there
had been other fine days that Summer; moreover, in likening himself to
a pig, he was ridiculously unfair to six feet of athletic symmetry in
which it would be difficult to detect any marked resemblance to the
animal whose name is a synonym for laziness.

On the way to the bathroom he stopped to