ow who I mean."

We tried to assure him that we were not, in a sense, seeking to involve
him in the situation, and I even went so far as to state our position,
briefly:

"I'd better explain, Hawkins. We are not doing police work. But, owing
to a chain of circumstances, we have learned that Mr. Wells did not kill
himself. He was murdered, or at least shot, by some one else. It may not
have been deliberate. Owing to what we have learned, certain people are
under suspicion. We want to clear things up for our own satisfaction."

"Then why is some one taking down what I say in the next room?"

He could only have guessed it, but he saw that he was right, by our
faces. He smiled bitterly. "Go on," he said. "Take it down. It can't
hurt anybody. I don't know who did it, and that's God's truth."

And, after long wrangling, that was as far as we got.

He suspected who had done it, but he did not know. He absolutely refused
to surrender the letters in his possession, and a sense of delicacy, I
think, kept us all from pressing the question of the A 31 matter.

"That's a personal affair," he said. "I've had a good bit of trouble.
I'm thinking now of going back to England."

And, as I say, we did not insist.

When he had gone, there seemed to be nothing to say. He had left the
same impression on all of us, I think--of trouble, but not of crime. Of
a man fairly driven; of wretchedness that was almost despair. He still
had the letters. He had, after all, as much right to them as we had,
which was, actually, no right at all. And, whatever it was, he still had
his secret.

Herbert was almost childishly crestfallen. Sperry's attitude was more
philosophical.

"A woman, of course," he said. "The A 31 letter shows it. He tried to
get her back, perhaps, by holding the letters over her head. And it
hasn't worked out. Poor devil! Only--who is the woman?"

It was that night, the fifteenth day after the crime, that the solution
came. Came as a matter of fact, to my door.

I was in the library, reading, or trying to read, a rather abstruse book
on psychic phenomena. My wife, I recall, had just asked me to change a
banjo record for "The End of a Pleasant Day," when the bell rang.

In our modest establishment the maids retire early, and it is my custom,
on those rare occasions when the bell rings after nine o'clock, to
answer the door myself.

To my surprise, it was Sperry, accompanied by two ladies, one of them
heavily veiled. It w