s
clientele. Besides, from what you tell me, the fellow must be well away
by this time. You'd do me a favor--a big one--by dropping the matter
here."

"Well, I won't!" I snapped indignantly. "I'll see it through--or start
something still livelier. Are you coming down with me to investigate
the room beneath us or do you want me to ring up police headquarters and
find out why?"

In the hall the policeman looked at me across the intervening heads
and dropped one slow, approving eyelid. "If the gintleman says so--" he
remarked in heavy tones fraught with meaning, and fixed a cold,
blue, appraising gaze on the detective, who thereupon yielded with
unexpectedly good grace.

"Aw, what's eating you?" was his amiable demand. "Sure, we was going
right down there anyhow--soon's we found out how the land lay up here."

The five of us took the elevator to the lower floor. An unfriendly
atmosphere surrounded me. I was held a hotel wrecker without reason. We
found the corridor empty, the floor desk abandoned--a state of things
rather strikingly the duplicate of that reigning overhead--and in due
course paused before Room 303, where the manager, figuratively speaking,
washed his hands of the affair.

"Here is the room, Mr. Bayne, for which you ask." If I would persist in
my nefarious course, added his tone.

The detective, obeying the hypnotic eye of the policeman, knocked. There
was silence. The bluecoat, my one ally, was crouching for a spring. Then
light steps crossed the room, and the door was opened. There stood a
girl,--a most attractive girl, the girl that I had seen downstairs.
Straight and slender, spiritedly gracious in bearing, with gray eyes
questioning us from beneath lashes of crinkly black, she was a radiant
figure as she stood facing us, with a coat of bright-blue velvet thrown
over her rosy gown.

"Beg pardon, miss," said the policeman, brightly, "this gintleman's been
robbed."

As her eyebrows went up a fraction, I could have murdered him, for how
else could she read his statement save that I took her for the thief?

"I am very sorry," I explained, bowing formally, "to disturb you. We
are hunting a thief who took French leave by my fire-escape. I must have
been mistaken--I thought that he dodged in again by this window. You
have not seen or heard anything of him, of course?"

"No, I haven't. But then, I just this instant came up from dinner,"
she replied. Her low, contralto tones, quite impersonal, were y