l. Never
was mortal freer of affectation. And his cheerfulness? It was as
expansive and as volatile as ether. His buoyancy was a perpetual,
never-failing tonic for doubt and discouragement, and I have yet to
witness him confronted with a situation that could in the least dash his
spirits.

He awaited my reply to his question with an air which suggested that
nothing less important than the well-being of his very existence was at
stake.

"Tell me what you have learned," returned I. Things usually acquire a
more comprehensible aspect when you have a few facts by which to measure
and weigh them, and I wanted to hear Stodger's story.

"Yip!" he cried cheerily. "Might as well sit here as anywhere else;
nobody to disturb us."

Weighted as he was with surplus flesh, his agility was amazing. He
wheeled round and plumped down on an oak bench, not unlike a church pew,
which stood against the panelled stairway beyond the newel. As I
followed I drew my overcoat closer about me, for the hall was cold and
dismal.

"This fellow Burke--Alexander Stilwell; queer chap. Close-mouthed?
Say!"--he squared around and tapped my chest with an impressive
forefinger--"a clam 's real noisy compared with him. Fact. Watched me
steady all the time I--you know--looked at the body."

Stodger stopped abruptly, with the manner of one to whom has occurred a
sudden brilliant idea. He thumped one fat knee with a pudgy hand, and
whispered with suppressed eagerness:

"By jinks, Swift! I have it! I 'll get Burke--Alexander Stilwell. Let
him talk--in there"--with a violent gesture toward the opposite side of
the hall--"library. What say? There's a--you know--alcove--curtains. I
'll hide behind 'em and listen; if he don't tell the story just like he
did to me, why, we 'll call the turn on him. See?"

For various reasons I thought the idea not a bad one, and said so.
Stodger was off up the stairs like a shot. He went nimbly round the
prostrate figure on the landing without so much as a look toward it, and
disappeared.

He and another man appeared, after a while, at the back of the hall,
having evidently availed themselves of a rear stairway.

I surveyed the private secretary with much interest, and must even now
confess, after no inconsiderable study of the human face, that I have
never since beheld one that was so utterly baffling.

He was a slender man of medium height, and of an age that might have been
anything between twenty