come a corpse?"

He leaned over and tapped on the table between us. "We are trying to
prove a crime. I intend for the time to be the criminal."

He looked so curious, bent forward and glaring at me from under his
bushy eyebrows, with his shoes on his knee--for he had taken them off
to wade to the stairs--and his trousers rolled to his knees, that I
wondered if he was entirely sane. But Mr. Holcombe, eccentric as he
might be, was sane enough.

"Not _really_ a criminal!"

"As really as lies in me. Listen, Mrs. Pitman. I want to put myself
in Ladley's place for a day or two, live as he lived, do what he did,
even think as he thought, if I can. I am going to sleep in his room
to-night, with your permission."

I could not see any reason for objecting, although I thought it silly
and useless. I led the way to the front room, Mr. Holcombe following
with his shoes and suit case. I lighted a lamp, and he stood looking
around him.

"I see you have been here since we left this afternoon," he said.

"Twice," I replied. "First with Mr. Graves, and later--"

The words died on my tongue. Some one had been in the room since my
last visit there.

"He has been here!" I gasped. "I left the room in tolerable order.
Look at it!"

"When were you here last?"

"At seven-thirty, or thereabouts."

"Where were you between seven-thirty and eight-thirty?"

"In the kitchen with Peter." I told him then about the dog, and about
finding him shut in the room.

The wash-stand was pulled out. The sheets of Mr. Ladley's manuscript,
usually an orderly pile, were half on the floor. The bed coverings had
been jerked off and flung over the back of a chair.

Peter, imprisoned, _might_ have moved the wash-stand and upset the
manuscript--Peter had never put the bed-clothing over the chair, or
broken his own leg.

"Humph!" he said, and getting out his note-book, he made an exact
memorandum of what I had told him, and of the condition of the room.
That done, he turned to me.

"Mrs. Pitman," he said, "I'll thank you to call me Mr. Ladley for the
next day or so. I am an actor out of employment, forty-one years of
age, short, stout, and bald, married to a woman I would like to be
quit of, and I am writing myself a play in which the Shuberts intend
to star me, or in which I intend the Shuberts to star me."

"Very well, Mr. Ladley," I said, trying to enter into the spirit of
the thing, and, God knows, seeing no humor in it. "Then you'll like
you