ntality. Normally a shrinking, nervous woman, she became
cold, passionless, deliberate in her revenge. To disgrace Schwartz and
Fleming was her original intention. But she could not get the papers.

She resorted to hounding Fleming, meaning to drive him to suicide. And
she chose a method that had more nearly driven him to madness. Wherever
he turned he found the figures eleven twenty-two C. Sometimes just the
number, without the letter. It had been Henry Butler's cell number
during his imprisonment, and if they were graven on his wife's soul,
they burned themselves in lines of fire on Fleming's brain. For over a
year she pursued this course--sometimes through the mail, at other times
in the most unexpected places, wherever she could bribe a messenger to
carry the paper. Sane? No, hardly sane, but inevitable as fate.

The time came when other things went badly with Fleming, as I had
already heard from Wardrop. He fled to the White Cat, and for a week
Ellen Butler hunted him vainly. She had decided to kill him, and on the
night Margery Fleming had found the paper on the pillow, she had been in
the house. She was not the only intruder in the house that night. Some
one--presumably Fleming himself--had been there before her. She found a
ladies' desk broken open and a small drawer empty. Evidently Fleming,
unable to draw a check while in hiding, had needed ready money. As to
the jewels that had been disturbed in Margery's boudoir I could only
surmise the impulse that, after prompting him to take them, had failed
at the sight of his dead wife's jewels. Surprised by the girl's
appearance, she had crept to the upper floor and concealed herself in an
empty bedroom. It had been almost dawn before she got out. No doubt this
was the room belonging to the butler, Carter, which Margery had reported
as locked that night.

She took a key from the door of a side entrance, and locked the door
behind her when she left. Within a couple of nights she had learned that
Wardrop was coming home from Plattsburg, and she met him at Bellwood. We
already knew the nature of that meeting. She drove back to town, half
maddened by her failure to secure the letters that would have cleared
her husband's memory, but the wiser by one thing: Wardrop had
inadvertently told her where Fleming was hiding.

The next night she went to the White Cat and tried to get in. She knew
from her husband of the secret staircase, for many a political meeting
of the deepes