would have been shadowing the house.

Jimmie Dale, smiling a little grimly, retraced his steps again, and
turned deliberately into a doorway--whose number he had noted as he had
passed a moment or so before. So, after all, there was time yet!
This was the house. "Number eighteen," she had said in her letter. "A
flat--three stories--Moyne lives on ground floor."

Jimmie Dale leaned against the vestibule door--there was a faint
click--a little steel instrument was withdrawn from the lock--and Jimmie
Dale stepped into the hall, where a gas jet, turned down, burned dimly.

The door of the ground-floor apartment was at his right, Jimmie Dale
reached up and turned off the light. Again those slim, tapering,
wonderfully sensitive fingers worked with the little steel instrument,
this time in the lock of the apartment door--again there was that almost
inaudible click--and then cautiously, inch by inch, the door opened
under his hand. He peered inside--down a hallway lighted, if it could be
called lighted at all, by a subdued glow from two open doors that gave
upon it--peered intently, listening intently, as he drew a black silk
mask from his pocket and slipped it over his face. And then, silent as
a shadow in his movements, the door left just ajar behind him, he stole
down the carpeted hallway.

Opposite the first of the open doorways Jimmie Dale paused--a curiously
hard expression creeping over his face, his lips beginning to droop
ominously downward at the corners. It was a little sitting room, cheaply
but tastefully furnished, and a young woman, Bookkeeper Bob's wife
evidently, and evidently sitting up for her husband, had fallen sound
asleep in a chair, her head pillowed on her arms that were outstretched
across the table. For a moment Jimmie Dale held there, his eyes on the
scene--and the next moment, his hand curved into a clenched fist, he had
passed on and entered the adjoining room.

It was a child's bedroom. A night lamp burned on a table beside the bed,
and the soft rays seemed to play and linger in caress on the tousled
golden hair of a little girl of perhaps two years of age--and something
seemed to choke suddenly in Jimmie Dale's throat--the sweet, innocent
little face, upturned to his, was smiling at him as she slept.

Jimmie Dale turned away his head--his eyelashes wet under his mask.
"BENEATH THE MATTRESS OF THE CHILD'S BED," the letter had said. His face
like stone, his lips a thin line now, Jimmie Dale's h