of unreality which remote events seem to gather round them. She went
on with her daily work to the satisfaction of her employers and the
augmentation of her own banking account, although no experience worthy
of record occurred in her routine for several weeks. But a lull in a
newspaper office is seldom of long duration.

One afternoon Mr. Hardwick came to the desk at which Jennie was at work,
and said to her,--

"Cadbury Taylor called here yesterday, and was very anxious to see you.
Has he been in again this afternoon?"

"You mean the detective? No, I haven't seen him since that day at the
Schloss Steinheimer. What did he want with me?"

"As far as I was able to understand, he has a very important case
on hand--a sort of romance in high life; and I think he wants your
assistance to unravel it; it seems to be baffling him."

"It is not very difficult to baffle Mr. Cadbury Taylor," said the girl,
looking up at her employer with a merry twinkle in her eye.

"Well, he appears to be in a fog now, and he expressed himself to me
as being very much taken with the neat way in which you unravelled the
diamond mystery at Meran, so he thinks you may be of great assistance
to him in his present difficulty, and is willing to pay in cash or in
kind."

"Cash payment I understand," said the girl, "but what does he mean by
payment in kind?"

"Oh, he is willing that you should make a sensational article out of the
episode. It deals entirely, he says, with persons in high life--titled
persons--and so it might make an interesting column or two for the
paper."

"I see--providing, of course, that the tangled skein was unravelled by
the transcendent genius of Mr. Cadbury Taylor," said the girl cynically.

"I don't think he wants his name mentioned," continued the editor; "in
fact, he said that it wouldn't do to refer to him at all, for if people
discovered that he made public any of the cases intrusted to him, he
would lose his business. He has been working on this problem for several
weeks, and I believe has made little progress towards its solution. His
client is growing impatient, so it occurred to the detective that you
might consent to help him. He said, with a good deal of complacency,
that he did not know you were connected with the _Bugle_, but he put his
wits at work and has traced you to this office."

"How clever he is!" said Jennie, laughing; "I am sure I made no secret
of the fact that I work for the _Daily Bugle_."