d balanced it on his hand. Dallas' florid face was almost
comical in his bewilderment; as for Jimmy--he slammed a piece of slag at
the furnace and walked away. At the door he turned around.

"Why don't you accuse me of it?" he asked bitterly. "Maybe you could
find a lump of coal in my pockets if you searched me."

He stalked up the stairs then and left us. Dallas and I went up
together, but we did not talk. There seemed to be nothing to say. Not
until I had closed and locked the door of my room did I venture to look
at something that I carried in the palm of my hand. It was a watch, not
running--a gentleman's flat gold watch, and it had been hanging by its
fob to a nail in the bricks beside the aperture.

In the back of the watch were the initials, T.H.H. and the picture of a
girl, cut from a newspaper.

It was my picture.

Chapter XVI. I FACE FLANNIGAN

Dinner waited that night while everybody went to the coal cellar and
stared at the hole in the wall, and watched while Max took a tracing of
it and of some footprints in the coal dust on the other side.

I did not go. I went into the library with the guilty watch in the fold
of my gown, and found Mr. Harbison there, staring through the February
gloom at the blank wall of the next house, and quite unconscious of the
reporter with a drawing pad just below him in the area-way. I went over
and closed the shutters before his very eyes, but even then he did not
move.

"Will you be good enough to turn around?" I demanded at last.

"Oh!" he said wheeling. "Are YOU here?"

There wasn't any reply to that, so I took the watch and placed it on the
library table between us. The effect was all that I had hoped. He stared
at it for an instant, then at me, and with his hand outstretched for it,
stopped.

"Where did you find it?" he asked. I couldn't understand his expression.
He looked embarrassed, but not at all afraid.

"I think you know, Mr. Harbison," I retorted.

"I wish I did. You opened it?"

"Yes."

We stood looking at each other across the table. It was his glance that
wavered.

"About the picture--of you," he said at last. "You see, down there in
South America, a fellow hasn't much to do in the evenings, and a--a chum
of mine and I--we were awfully down on what we called the plutocrats,
the--the leisure classes. And when that picture of yours came in the
paper, we had--we had an argument. He said--" He stopped.

"What did he say?"

"Well, he said i