wired you from
Quebec, or anywhere else, I began to ask questions. Your janitor
answered the first one: you had already gone to Canada. I couldn't
imagine what was going on, but it seemed to be worth following up, so I
took the next train for Quebec."

"And you didn't wire ahead?" said Prime.

"No; it didn't occur to me, but it wouldn't have done any good. Your
disappearance was two days old when I reached Quebec. You weren't missed
much, but Miss Millington was; the school-teachers were milling around
and raising all sorts of a row. But in another day it quieted down flat.
Somebody started the story that you two had run off together to get
married; that it had been all cut and dried between you beforehand."

"That was probably a part of the plot--to account for us in that way,"
Lucetta put in.

"No doubt it was," Grider went on. "But the elopement story didn't
satisfy me. I knew there wasn't any reason in the wide world why Don
shouldn't get married openly, if he could find any girl foolish enough
to say 'yes,' so I simply discounted the gossip and wired for
detectives. A very little sleuth work developed the fact that each of
you had been seen last in company with one of the Bandishes. That gave
us a sort of a clew, and we began to trail Mr. Horace Bandish and dig up
his record."

"And while you were doing all this for us, we ... honestly, Mr. Grider,
I am ashamed to tell you what we were saying of you," said the young
woman in penitent self-abasement.

"Oh, that was all right. In times past I had given Don plenty of
material of that sort to work on; only I wish I had known how you were
looking at it--that you were charging it all up to me. It would have
lightened the gloom immensely. But to get on: we trailed Bandish, as I
say, and found that he had had an aeroplane shipped to him at Quebec a
few days before your arrival there. That looked a bit suspicious, and a
little more digging made it look more so. The 'plane had been unloaded
and carted away, and a few days later had been brought back and shipped
to Ottawa. That left a pretty plain trail, but still there was no
evidence of criminality."

"Of course, you didn't know anything about the legacy, at that stage of
it?" Prime threw in.

"Not a thing in the world. More than that, Bandish's record was decently
good. We found that he had been a sort of general factotum for a rich
old man, and had been left comfortably well off when his employer died.
There wa