xicab driver's was the more probable, as far
as Miss Jane was concerned. Knowing her child-like nature, her timidity,
her shrinking and shamefaced fear of the dark, it was almost incredible
that she would walk the three miles to Wynton, voluntarily, and from
there lose herself in the city. Besides, such an explanation would not
fit the blood-stains, or the fact that she had gone, as far as we could
find out, in her night-clothes.

Still--she had left the village that night, either by cab or on foot. If
the driver had been correct in his time, however, the taxicab was almost
eliminated; he said the woman got into the cab at one-thirty. It was
between one-thirty and one-forty-five when Margery heard the footsteps
in the attic.

I think for the first time it came to me, that day, that there was at
least a possibility that Miss Jane had not been attacked, robbed or
injured: that she had left home voluntarily, under stress of great
excitement. But if she had, why? The mystery was hardly less for being
stripped of its gruesome details. Nothing in my knowledge of the missing
woman gave me a clue. I had a vague hope that, if she had gone
voluntarily, she would see the newspapers and let us know where she was.

To my list of exhibits I added the purse with its inclosure. The secret
drawer of my desk now contained, besides the purse, the slip marked
eleven twenty-two that had been pinned to Fleming's pillow; the similar
scrap found over Miss Jane's mantel; the pearl I had found on the floor
of the closet, and the cyanide, which, as well as the bullet, Burton
had given me. Add to these the still tender place on my head where
Wardrop had almost brained me with a chair, and a blue ankle, now
becoming spotted with yellow, where I had fallen down the dumb-waiter,
and my list of visible reminders of the double mystery grew to eight.

I was not proud of the part I had played. So far, I had blundered, it
seemed to me, at every point where a blunder was possible. I had fallen
over folding chairs and down a shaft; I had been a half-hour too late to
save Allan Fleming; I had been up and awake, and Miss Jane had got out
of the house under my very nose. Last, and by no means least, I had
waited thirty-five years to find the right woman, and when I found her,
some one else had won her. I was in the depths that day when Burton came
in.

He walked into the office jauntily and presented Miss Grant with a club
sandwich neatly done up in waxed