issed!"

"What?" said Wilkins.

Bates looked him over sternly, as if to suggest that if he happened to
be a friend of Felice he had passed beneath contempt.

"She's _went_!" Bates said sourly. "This here house is no place for
young Frenchies that wanders the streets at night, believe me. She
sneaked in--I dunno what hour this early morning, and she was able to
give no account at all of where she'd been. There wasn't no further
questions asked; she went, bag and baggage!"

One of those mental clouds which had been troubling Anthony since last
night came now to engulf the complacent Wilkins. He looked at Bates, as
if refusing to believe a word of it. He looked at the trunk and his
expression was a study.

"Well, as to where this young person has gone," Wilkins said. "You see,
this trunk being, as it were, her personal property, I've been asked to
see that she gets it herself and----"

"Where she's gone is no concern of ours. We don't know and we don't want
to know!" said Mr. Bates. "The hussy went without a character and that's
all we can tell you about her. And this here house is too full of
trouble for me to be bothering with you about her trunk," concluded Mr.
Bates. "Anything belonging to her gets out!"

"Out!" Wilkins muttered.

"Out!" said Mr. Bates, and pointed at the door.

* * * * *

Let us not forget what Anthony altogether forgot, to wit: the sinister
warning of Hobart Hitchin in regard to shipping boxes, trunks or other
containers that might well have held a dismembered body.

For one of Hitchin's strange temperament and habits of thought, his own
apartment could not have been situated more happily, if an affair of
this kind were to involve Anthony Fry.

Room for room, the home of the prosperous crime-student was directly
below that of Anthony; they used the same dumbwaiter, and they were
served by the same service elevator, so that if Hitchin had so elected
he could even have inspected the meals that went to Anthony's table.
Still more, they were in the old wing of the Lasande, where the rooms
are larger, but where the floors--laid long before the days of
sound-proof concrete filling--permit the unduly inquisitive to hear much
of what goes on above and below.

According to his own reasoning, Hitchin had struck upon the
investigation of his whole lifetime. Surely as he wore spectacles,
murder had been done in the flat of the impeccable Anthony Fry.

What the mot