There was no one. Napier leaned against the wall, standing where, through the door ajar, he could command the stairs.

"We heard," Singleton in his cheerful, cultivated tones was saying to Lady McIntyre "we heard the gentleman you were waiting for had arrived."

"Yes; but I-I have n't yet had time to explain." That poor head which Lady McIntyre had jerked to Singleton, she jerked now to Napier. "They want me,' she told him, "to search Greta's things. What do you think of that?" As Napier did n't at once say what he thought of it, Lady McIntyre flung out, "While she 's away!"

Instead of denouncing such a demand, Napier asked,

"Where is she?"

"Oh, they 've gone off to see some old church, or something, on the coast."

"You don't know where?"

She shook her head.

"Has a"-Napier caught his tongue back from articulating "Nan"—"they 've all gone? :?”

"Yes; and they may be back any moment."

Napier seemed to read in the easy confidence in Mr. Singleton's eyes that he personally did not look for the return of the party at that moment. But it occurred to Napier that "the party" meant to the secret service men only Greta von Schwarzenberg. It seemed quite possible to Napier's own fears that by some perverse stroke Nan Ellis might return alone. She might even at the last moment-Fate did play these tricks-have fallen out of the party. In one of the rooms overhead she might be meditating descent.

"I have been explaining"-Mr. Singleton seemed to invite Mr. Napier's cooperation "that since Lady McIntyre is so sure the view held by the Intelligence Department is mistaken, that it's a kindness to the young lady to embrace this opportunity to clear the matter up."

"Imagine the shabbiness of such conduct!" Lady McIntyre appealed to the

fortunately, a"-Mr. Singleton smiled pleasantly-"an assistant who was in his way a genius at avoidance of breakage or any sort of violence."

The fastidiousness with which he repudiated "any sort of violence" plainly gave Lady McIntyre pause. Even in the thick of a thousand agitations it was noticeable how great a part was played in the persuading of the lady by the voice and manner of the agent, particularly by the voice. Its natural timbre, its accent, its curve and fall, all connoted the moral decencies, as well as the external fitnesses and refinements of good breeding. If you suspected this man of baseness, you simply gave away your own unworthy thoughts. The reticent dignity with which he uttered the phrase, "for sake of the safety of the country," that of itself seemed to range him on the side of defenders in the field.

Helplessly, Lady McIntyre waited upon the guidance she had sent for.

"Have you had official warning of this visit?" Napier asked her.

"No."

"There are reasons," Mr. Singleton reminded him, "as you must see, why a warn

ing would defeat the purpose of the visit." "You have a warrant for this search?" He had. He produced it, an order under the Official Secrets Act.

"If a mistake has been made, Mr. Grindley and I," he said as he returned the document to his inside pocket, "can assure ourselves of the fact and be out of the house in half an hour. Unless Lady McIntyre should, unhappily, be too long in making up her mind," he glanced at the French clock on the mantelpiece,-"neither the German lady nor any one outside this room and the Intelligence Department will ever know of the investigation. Is n't that better than the alternative-having it conducted in public?"

graph. It showed a girl in her teens at another window. Two long plaits fell over the sill as the eager figure leaned out to greet with all that joy and affection the woman whom Napier was here to convict of felony and to cover with disgrace. No need of the signature under the sill to say the girl was "Miss Greta's ever loving Nan."

That first cursory glance about the room had seemed both to please and to intrigue Singleton. His face wore the look of intentness, of subdued satisfaction, with which your sportsman addresses himself to a game he knows he 's good at.

He

"He likes ferreting things out! likes it!" Napier said to himself as Singleton swung back with one of his easy movements and turned the key in the door.

"What Greta will think when she tries it and finds it locked, and me in here!" Lady McIntyre bemoaned to Napier.

"I could n't let them do it with no one here." She clung an instant to Napier's

arm.

He and Singleton glanced up and down corridor and stair as the three men followed Lady McIntyre's lead into a room at the end of a passage.

The first thing noticeable about the little room was its air of distinction, bred only in part by the taste shown in the choice of certain articles of furniture, culled, Napier was sure, from other parts of the house during that week Miss Greta had spent alone here. Not her knowledge of values in Möbeln alone, but something less obvious in the serene, uncrowded aspect, in the exquisite orderliness, lent the little room its special air.

Singleton walked straight to the window. It commanded the approach to the house and looked upon the sea. It was n't till a moment later that Napier verified this fact. On the dressing-table, which stood out two feet or so in front of the window, his eyes had found a faded photo

"Oh, but she won't," answered Singleton. He nodded toward the window. "You'll see her coming." He laid down

the bed and picked up a book lying there. He read aloud the title, " 'Pilgerfahrt,' by Gerhard," for Grindley's benefit, apparently, for he looked at that person interrogatively. "With Nan's love,'" he added, as though that might fetch Grindley.

But Grindley seemed to have neither literary nor sentimental curiosity. By the tall gilt screen set against the angle of the opposite wall Grindley halted as if he had forgotten why he was there, and felt unequal to the mental effort of recalling. You'd say he no more realized that the leaves of the screen were turned back so as almost to meet the angle described by the wall than that the panels were composed of exquisite engravings after Fragonard, set in old gilt. Even when he moved a pace or two, you would say that he was speculating whereabouts in a room so scantily, albeit so charmingly, furnished as to boast only a single chair should he find a place whereon to lay hat and stick, and the small despatch-case of the same color as the brown clothes he wore. Whether

for that reason or because of the inconspicuous way in which it was carried, Napier had not noticed the case till Grindley set it down against the skirting of the wall, along with hat and stick.

She

For those first moments, glued to the window, Lady McIntyre alternately watched the avenue leading to the house and watched the two strange men. made no effort to disguise her perturbation at not having two pairs of eyes, the better to keep her poor little watch upon "dear Greta's things."

"You don't, I suppose, expect to find anything contraband on her dressingtable," she said as Singleton paused to run his eyes over the glittering array. "You may know that 's all right when I tell you Sir William and I gave her the toilet-set last Christmas."

Singleton stooped to the faded photograph, an act as offensive in Napier's eyes as the next was in Lady McIntyre's-his attempt to open the little inlaid bureau.

"That is her writing-table," said the lady, with dignity. "Of course it's locked. An engaged girl always locks her-"

"Yes; this, Grindley," Singleton said, and Grindley, moving like a soft, brown shadow, was there with some bits of iron hanging keywise on a ring. Some of these slender "persuaders" were notched and some were hooked. There were also one or two pieces of wire.

Lady McIntyre identified these in a horrified whisper as "Burglars' tools!"

"Or that, first?" Singleton interrupted, with a nod at the screen.

"Yes, it's her box behind there," Lady McIntyre said and clasped her hands. "But if you break that, a most queer lock, you can never mend it. And she 'll know what we 've-"

Mr. Grindley gave a slow head-shake. "American wardrobe trunk," he said, as though he had been tall enough to see over the close-set screen, and took no interest in what it hid. He inserted a steel object into the lock of the writing-table, and opened the flap as easily as if he'd had the key; more easily than if Lady McIntyre had had it.

"Her private letters!" she murmured, with horror. "Love-letters!"

Far more offensive, Napier was sure, than if Grindley had fallen upon the neat packets and loose papers with greedy curiosity was the bored cursoriness, as it looked, of the inspection. Perhaps the other man was really going to read them through when he had-heavens above! what was he doing in Greta's cupboard? "Disgraceful!" said Lady McIntyre under her breath. Singleton was passing his hands along the row of skirts neatly hung at the side. The investigating fingers reached those other garments suspended at a greater height. From supports, hooked upon a bar set overhead, depended afternoon and evening gowns, the pink cotton, the black and gold, the lemon-colored-all of familiar aspect, and yet in this collapsed state odd-looking, defenseless, taken at disadvantage. Napier with some difficulty recognized the apple-green silk, all its sauciness gone, as dejected now as a deflated balloon. And this stranger's hand upon them!

"Disgusting familiarity I call it. He'll be feeling in her pockets next," Lady McIntyre whispered tremulously. "I don't know how I can bear to be here."

Napier himself was too aware of a Peeping-Tom unseemliness in looking in upon these privacies to stand there watching. He turned again to the glittering dressing-table and the treasure it enshrined. What would n't he give to be able to slip that photograph into his pocket? Nan looked at him out of her window with unsullied trust.

Napier glanced nervously out of the other, the window behind the dressingtable. While he had been watching Singleton and looking at the pictured face, Nan might easily have come into the house; for Lady McIntyre, too, had clean forgotten that side of her sentinelship.

Meanwhile Greta, or worse yet, immeasurably worse, Nan, might be running up-stairs that instant. Napier turned round, so palpably listening, that even Lady McIntyre in the midst of her agitations saw what must be in his mind.

"Yes, any moment they 'll be in upon us!" She fled again to the window.

"Grindley, here!" Singleton called from the cupboard.

But Grindley had found something at last which, though it seemed not to interest him, had proved itself worthy to be abstracted. Not one of the love-letters, as Lady McIntyre plainly feared. It was nothing more exciting than Greta's French dictionary. Grindley came away from the littered bureau holding the fat volume. open in his hand, and turning the leaves at random.

Singleton joined him.

"What have you got there?" "La Motte's 'Dictionary.''

"Is that all?" Singleton dismissed it. Not so Grindley. He stooped, and laid the book on the floor beside his brown case. Singleton was obviously disappointed. He glanced back at the writing-table, the drawers of which had been left open.

"Nothing else?" he said.

"Only this." Grindley took a ballnibbed pen out of the tray.

Singleton examined it carefully.

"Yes," he said. He appeared to think the pen worthy of all care. He opened Grindley's nearly empty despatch-case and laid the pen on top of a piece of brown paper that covered something at the bottom. "And the ink?" He seemed to wait for it.

Grindley was understood to say, "Not yet." Lady McIntyre pointed out the twin pots on the silver tray engraved, “G. v. S. from N. E., Christmas, 1913."

"This is the ink," she said. Nobody seemed to hear. Grindley had gone to the dressing-table, leaving behind him. open drawers and Greta's papers in confusion.

Lady McIntyre followed.

"I must trouble you,” she said, with dignity, "to put the writing-table as you found it."

"It is n't necessary," murmured the outrageous Grindley.

"But that is monstrous! You promised -at least, the other one-" She looked round. "The other one," lost to view,

was pursuing his nefarious course in the hanging cupboard. "You heard him, Mr. Napier?" She spoke with tremulous bitterness. "If I let them investigate quietly, no one need ever know."

"Yes, if we found we were mistaken," Singleton stuck his head out of the cupboard to say; "but, you see, we find we are not mistaken." He disappeared among folds of apple-green silk and lemon chiffon. "Not mistaken!" cried Lady McIntyre. "What have you discovered?" Napier called to Singleton.

It was Grindley, ludicrously inadequate, who answered: "The pen."

Lady McIntyre ran to the open despatch-case and took it out. Grindley, at the dressing-table, fingering Greta's toiletset, kept a vacant eye on Lady McIntyre.

"What could be more innocent than a perfectly new pen? Look, Mr. Napier. It's never been used, not even once!" She thrust the pen into Napier's hand.

"Look at the point," advised Grindley. "Well, look at it. Perfectly clean. If it matters," Lady McIntyre said, "that pen has never touched ink. And how can you write with a pen if you don't write with ink?"

"We might ask the lady," suggested Grindley, who was actually opening and unscrewing Greta's silver toilet things holding bottles up to the light, smelling at corks and stoppers. He slipped out of its silver shell a small bottle of thick, blue glass. He uncorked it and smelled it. "This is it," he said.

Lady McIntyre, with the dive of a dragon-fly, was at his side.

"You think because that 's labeled 'Poison' there's something suspicious about her having it. It just shows! That bottle is part of the manicure set. Read what it says above the label," she commanded.

"Pour les ongles," the obliging young man pronounced with impeccable accent. "Yes." And he took the bottle over to the despatch-case.

Lady McIntyre made a motion to arrest, to retrieve. As Napier laid a hand on her arm, trembling she stood still.