oks and
a small yearly income, just sufficient to maintain a better wardrobe
than her father's salary would permit.

Grant, newly settled in Steynholme, found the postmaster and his daughter
intellectually on a par with himself, and this claim could certainly not
be made on behalf of the local "society" element. The three became
excellent friends. Naturally, the young people spent a good deal of time
together. But there had been no love-making--not a hint or whisper of it!

And now, by cruel chance, their names were linked by scandal in its most
menacing form, since there was no gainsaying the fact that Doris's
star-gazing on that fatal Monday night was indissolubly bound up with the
death of Adelaide Melhuish.

For the first time, then, the notion peeped up in Grant's mind that the
whirligig of existence might see Doris his wife. But the conceit
resembled the Gorgon's teeth, which, when sown in the ground, sprang
forth as armed men. The very accident which revealed a not unpleasing
possibility had established a grave obstacle in the way of its ultimate
realization. Already there was a cloud between him and the Martins,
father and daughter. To what a tempest might not that cloud develop when
the questionings and innuendoes of the inquest established an aura of
suspicion and intrigue around a perfectly innocent meeting in the garden
of The Hollies!

Grant ate his breakfast in wrath. In wrath, too, he glanced through the
morning newspapers, and saw his own name figuring large in the "story" of
the "alleged" murder. The reporters had missed nothing. They had even got
hold of the "peculiar coincidence" of his (Grant's) glimpse of a face at
the window. His play was recalled, and Adelaide Melhuish's success in the
title-role. Then Mr. Isidor G. Ingerman was introduced. He was described
as "a man fairly well known in the City." That was all. The press could
say nothing as yet of marital disagreements, nor was any hint concerning
Doris Martin allowed to appear. But these journalistic fire-works were
only held in reserve. "Dramatic and sensational developments" were
promised, and police activity in "an unexpected direction" fore-shadowed.

All of which, of course, was mere journalistic paraphrasing of
circumstances already known to the writers, and none the less galling to
Grant on that account.

And there was no answer from the Commissioner of Police at Scotland Yard.
True, the overnight telegram might have reached the De