acitated by it. His face and hands were white and a little flabby,
and he wore his hair rather long, which, it is said, accounts for
the weakness of some men, on the assumption that long hair wastes
the strength. But Burlingame quickly remembered the attitude of the
lady--Crozier's wife, he was certain--and of Crozier in the
dining-room a few moments before, and to his suspicious eyes it was
not characteristic of a happy family party. No doubt this grimness of
Crozier was due to domestic trouble and not wholly to his own presence.
Still, he felt softly for the tiny pistol he always carried in his big
waistcoat pocket, and it comforted him.

Beyond the corner of the house Crozier paused and took a key from his
pocket. It opened a side door to his own room, seldom used, since it
was always so pleasant in this happy home to go through the main
living-room, which every one liked so much that, though it was not the
dining-room, it was generally used as such, and though it was not the
parlour, it was its frequent substitute. Opening the door, Crozier
stepped aside to let Burlingame pass. It was two years since Burlingame
had been in this room, and then he had entered it without invitation.
His inquisitiveness had led him to explore it with no good intent when
he lived in the house.

Entering now, he gave it quick scrutiny. It was clear he was looking
for something in particular. He was, in fact, searching for signs of its
occupancy by another than Shiel Crozier--tokens of a woman's presence.
There was, however, no sign at all of that, though there were signs of
a woman's care and attention in a number of little things--homelike,
solicitous, perhaps affectionate care and attention. Certainly the
spotless pillows, the pretty curtains, the pincushion, and charmingly
valanced bed and shelves, cheap though the material was, showed a
woman's very friendly care. When he lived in that house there were no
such little attentions paid to him! It was his experience that where
such attentions went something else went with them. A sensualist
himself, it was not conceivable to him that men and women could be under
the same roof without "passages of sympathetic friendship and tokens of
affinity." That was a phrase he had frequently used when pursuing his
own sort of happiness.

His swift scrutiny showed that Crozier's wife had no habitation here,
and that gave him his cue for what the French call "the reconstruction
of the crime." It cert