elling peas, as he
confided to his wife that night. He was especially flattered at the
interest Crewe seemed to display in his long connection with the police
force, and also in his private affairs. The constable was explaining with
parental vanity the precocious cleverness of his youngest child, a girl
of two, when Holymead made his appearance, and he became aware that Mr.
Crewe's interest in children was at an end.

"Look at that man," said Crewe, in a sharp imperative tone to the
police-constable, as the K.C. was walking down the path of the Italian
garden to the plantation. "You saw him come in?"

"Yes, sir."

"Do you see any difference?"

"No, sir; he's the same man," said Flack, with stolid certainty.

"Anything about him that is different?" continued Crewe.

Police-Constable Flack looked at Crewe in some bewilderment. He was not
a deductive expert, and, as he told his wife afterwards, he did not know
what the detective was "driving at." He took another long look at
Holymead, who was then within a few yards of the plantation on his way
to the gates, and remarked, in a hesitating tone, as though to justify
his failure:

"Well, you see, sir, when he was coming in it was the front view I saw,
now I can only see his back."

But before he had finished speaking Crewe had left him and was following
the K.C. Holymead had gone into the house without a walking-stick, and
had reappeared carrying one on his arm. Crewe admired the cool audacity
which had prompted Holymead to go into a house where a murder had been
committed to recover his stick under the very eyes of the police, and he
immediately formed the conclusion that the K.C. had come to the house to
recover the stick for some urgent reason possibly not unconnected with
the crime. And it was apparent that Holymead was a shrewd judge of human
nature, Crewe reflected, for he calculated that the rareness of the
quality of observation, even in those who, like Flack, were supposed to
keep their eyes open, would permit him to do so unnoticed.

As Crewe went down the path he beckoned to the boy Joe, who at the moment
was acting the part of a comic dentist binding a recalcitrant patient to
a chair, using an immense old-fashioned straight-backed chair which stood
in the hall, for his stage setting. Joe overtook his master as he entered
the ornamental plantation in front of the house, and Crewe quickly
whispered his instructions, as the retreating figure of the K.C. thr