morning.'

'On the _Leofric_?'

'Yes.'

'So do I. We shall cross together.'

'How delightful! I'm so glad! Good-night again.'

Alphonsine was standing at the open door of the dressing-room in the
bright light, and Margaret nodded and went in. The maid looked after
the elderly man till he finally disappeared, and then she went in too
and locked the door after her.

Griggs walked home in the bitter March weather. When he was in New
York, he lived in rooms on the second floor of an old business
building not far from Fifth Avenue. He was quite alone in the house at
night, and had to walk up the stairs by the help of a little electric
pocket-lantern he carried. He let himself into his own door, turned
up the light, slipped off his overcoat and gloves, and went to the
writing-table to get his pipe. That is very often the first thing a
man does when he gets home at night.

The old briar pipe he preferred to any other lay on the blotting-paper
in the circle where the light was brightest. As he took it a stain on
his right hand caught his eye, and he dropped the pipe to look at
it. The blood was dark and was quite dry, and he could not find any
scratch to account for it. It was on the inner side of his right hand,
between the thumb and forefinger, and was no larger than an ordinary
watch.

'How very odd!' exclaimed Mr. Griggs aloud; and he turned his hand
this way and that under the electric lamp, looking for some small
wound which he supposed must have bled. There was a little more inside
his fingers, and between them, as if it had oozed through and then had
spread over his knuckles.

But he could find nothing to account for it. He was an elderly man who
had lived all over the world and had seen most things, and he was not
easily surprised, but he was puzzled now. Not the least strange thing
was that the stain should be as small as it was and yet so dark. He
crossed the room again and examined the front of his overcoat with the
most minute attention. It was made of a dark frieze, almost black,
on which a red stain would have shown very little; but after a very
careful search Griggs was convinced that the blood which had stained
his hand had not touched the cloth.

He went into his dressing-room and looked at his face in his
shaving-glass, but there was certainly no stain on the weather-beaten
cheeks or the furrowed forehead.

'How very odd!' he exclaimed a second time.

He washed his hands slowly and carefull