sage. "Ruth has been very ill ever since," Mrs. Morton added
drearily. "If she is not better in the morning, I shall call in a
doctor. She felt herself absolutely safe, here, and was recovering her
cheerfulness. Now all her fears have returned with redoubled force. I am
terribly worried about her--terribly worried." Taking out her
handkerchief, the poor woman wiped the tears from her eyes. "How could
these people have known we were here?" she whispered, in an awed voice.
"It seems like the work of fiends."

There was little that the detective could say in reply. Even to his
sober judgment, there came a suggestion of the uncanny, the
supernatural. The woman in the cab had escaped at half past nine,
presumably quite ignorant of the location of Mrs. Morton's retreat. Half
an hour later, the campaign of intimidation was renewed with greater
vigor than before.

"I'm afraid, Mrs. Morton," he said, "that it will be necessary for you
to remain with your daughter every minute of the time, for a day or two.
By then, I am convinced that we shall have laid our hands on the guilty
parties. Good night."

Duvall rose very early the following morning, and drove at once to the
studio, but early as he was, Mr. Baker was there before him.

The latter was seated in his office, poring over a mass of reports, when
Duvall entered. He glanced up, rose, shook hands nervously, then
motioned to a chair.

"Nothing new yet," he said. "My stenographer, Miss King, is here.
Neither Miss Green nor Miss Ford have yet arrived, but it is still a
little early. Miss King came before her usual time, as she had some
reports to get out that she could not complete last night. We have at
least fifteen minutes to wait."

Duvall told him to proceed with his work, and drawing a newspaper from
his pocket, made an effort to interest himself in it. In this, however,
he was not very successful. Time after time his mind would wander from
the printed sheet before him to the strange events of the night before.
The thing that puzzled him most was, how did the persecutors of Miss
Morton discover her new address so soon? Was the woman who had handed
the package to Nora, the maid, the same one that had vanished from the
cab? He remembered that it had been about nine o'clock when they left
the Grand Theater, and perhaps half-past when he had gone into the drug
store in Sixth Avenue to get the aromatic spirits of ammonia. Had the
woman gone directly from the cab to the h