ppeared from the dark to claim it. What should he do?

He got up and started for number seventeen. The girl who waited there
was very charming and attractive--but what did he know about her? What
did she want with this money? He paused This other girl came from Hal
Bentley, a friend of friends. And she claimed to have every right to
this precious package. What were her exact words?

Why not wait until morning? Perhaps, in the cold gray dawn, he would see
more clearly his way through this preposterous tangle. Anyhow, it would
be dangerous to give into any woman's keeping just then a package so
earnestly sought by desperate men. Yes, he would wait until morning.
That was the only reasonable course.

Reasonable? That was the word he used. A knight prating of the
reasonable!

Mr. Magee unlocked the door of number seven and entered. Lighting his
candles and prodding the fire, he composed a note to the waiting girl in
seventeen:

"Everything all right. Sleep peacefully. I am on the job. Will see you
to-morrow. Mr.--Billy."

Slipping this message under her door, the ex-knight hurried away to
avoid an interview, and sat down in his chair before the fire.

"I must think," he muttered. "I must get this thing straight."

For an hour he pondered, threshing out as best he could this mysterious
game in which he played a leading part unequipped with a book of rules.
He went back to the very beginning--even to the station at Upper
Asquewan Falls where the undeniable charm of the first of these girls
had won him completely. He reviewed the arrival of Bland and his babble
of haberdashery, of Professor Bolton and his weird tale of peroxide
blondes and suffragettes, of Miss Norton and her impossible mother, of
Cargan, hater of reformers, and Lou Max, foe of suspicion. He thought of
the figure in the dark at the foot of the steps that had fought so
savagely for the package now in his own pocket--of the girl who had
pleaded so convincingly on the balcony for his help--of the colder, more
sophisticated woman who came with Hal Bentley's authority to ask of him
the same favor. Myra Thornhill? He had heard the name, surely. But
where?

Mr. Magee's thoughts went back to New York. He wondered what they would
say if they could see him now, whirling about in a queer romance not of
his own writing--he who had come to Baldpate Inn to get away from mere
romancing and look into men's hearts, a philosopher. He laughed out
loud.

"To-morrow i