ave been friends ever since."

"You went to luncheon with her, and--" Constance prompted.

"Oh, she told me her story. It was very much like my own--a husband who
was a perfect bear, and then gossip about him that so many people,
besides his own wife, seemed to know, and--"

Constance shook her head. "Really," she observed thoughtfully, "it's a
wonder to me how any one stays married these days. Somebody is always
mixing in, getting one or the other so wrought up that they get to
thinking there is no possibility of happiness. That's where the crook
detective comes in."

Anita Douglas, confidence established now, poured out her story
unreservedly, as there was little reason why she should not, a story of
the refined brutality and neglect and inhumanity of her husband.

She told of her own first suspicions of him, of a girl who had been his
stenographer, a Miss Helen Brett.

But he was careful. There had never been any direct, positive evidence
against him. Still, there was enough to warrant a separation and the
payment to her of an allowance.

They had lived, she said, in a pretty little house in the suburb of
Glenclair, near New York. Now that they were separated, she had taken a
little kitchenette apartment at the new Melcombe. Her husband was
living in the house, she believed, when he was not in the city at his
club, "or elsewhere," she added bitterly.

"But," she confided as she finished, "it is very lonely here in a big
city all alone."

"I know it is," agreed Constance sympathetically as they parted. "I,
too, am often very lonely. Call on me, especially if you find anything
crooked going on. Call on me, anyhow. I shall be glad to see you any
time."

The words, "anything crooked going on," rang in Mrs. Douglas's ears
long after the elevator door had clanged shut and her new friend had
gone. She was visibly perturbed. And the more she thought about it the
more perturbed she became.

She had carried on a mild, then an ardent, flirtation with the man who
had introduced himself as "Mr. White"--really Lynn Munro. But she
relied on her woman's instinct in her judgment of him. No, she felt
sure that he could not be other than she thought. But as for Alice
Murray and her friend whom she had met at the Palais de Maxixe--well,
she was forced to admit that she did not know, that Constance's warning
might, after all, be true.

Munro had had to run out of town for a few days on a business trip.
That she knew, for