ohn etchings which hung on the wall, and which
Mr. Milburgh stopped to regard approvingly. He hung up his coat and hat,
slipped off the galoshes he was wearing (for it was wet underfoot), and,
passing through a door which opened from the passage, came to his living
room. The same simple note of furniture and decoration was observable
here. The furniture was good, the carpet under his feet thick and
luxurious. He snicked down another switch and an electric radiator glowed
in the fireplace. Then he sat down at the big table, which was the most
conspicuous article of furniture in the room. It was practically covered
with orderly little piles of paper, most of them encircled with rubber
bands. He did not attempt to touch or read them, but sat looking moodily
at his blotting-pad, preoccupied and absent.

Presently he rose with a little grunt, and, crossing the room, unlocked a
very commonplace and old-fashioned cupboard, the top of which served as a
sideboard. From the cupboard he took a dozen little books and carried
them to the table. They were of uniform size and each bore the figures of
a year. They appeared to be, and indeed were, diaries, but they were not
Mr. Milburgh's diaries. One day he chanced to go into Thornton Lyne's
room at the Stores and had seen these books arrayed on a steel shelf of
Lyne's private safe. The proprietor's room overlooked the ground floor of
the Stores, and Thornton Lyne at the time was visible to his manager, and
could not under any circumstances surprise him, so Mr. Milburgh had taken
out one volume and read, with more than ordinary interest, the somewhat
frank and expansive diary which Thornton Lyne had kept.

He had only read a few pages on that occasion, but later he had an
opportunity of perusing the whole year's record, and had absorbed a great
deal of information which might have been useful to him in the future,
had not Thornton Lyne met his untimely end at the hands of an unknown
murderer.

On the day when Thornton Lyne's body was discovered in Hyde Park with a
woman's night-dress wrapped around the wound in his breast, Mr. Milburgh
had, for reasons of expediency and assisted by a duplicate key of Lyne's
safe, removed those diaries to a safer place. They contained a great deal
that was unpleasant for Mr. Milburgh, particularly the current diary, for
Thornton Lyne had set down not only his experiences, but his daily
happenings, his thoughts, poetical and otherwise, and had stated ve