and inspected them carefully.

"Somebody in this apartment wrote those notes, all right," Farland
mused. "But why? That's the question I want answered, and I'll have to
be careful how I start in to find out. You can't bluff that girl; one
look is enough to tell me that. If I jump her about those notes, she'll
probably get wise and cover her tracks, and then I'll be strictly up
against it."

He found nothing else of importance in the apartment. There were some
letters, but they seemed to be from relatives scattered throughout the
country, ordinary letters dealing with family affairs of no particular
consequence, and they told Jim Farland nothing that he wished to know.

But Kate Gilbert was only one angle of the case, he reminded himself,
and so he decided that he was done for the present as far as she was
concerned. It would be only a waste of valuable time, he thought, to
remain longer in the Gilbert apartment; and there were plenty of other
things for him to be doing.

Farland went all over the apartment once more, making sure that he was
leaving everything in its proper place, that there would be nothing to
show that anybody had been making an investigation there. Then he
hurried out and locked the door, returned the keys to the old janitor,
gave him another bill and instructed him to forget the visit, lighted a
black cigar, and started walking rapidly southward.

When the proper time arrived, Jim Farland would tell Miss Kate Gilbert
that he knew she had written the anonymous notes to Sidney Prale--or
that her maid had--and he would ask her why.

He reached Columbus Circle, made his way over to Fifth Avenue, and
continued his walk down that broad thoroughfare. Farland had decided to
go to the hotel and have a talk with Sidney Prale and Murk. He told
himself that he was going to like Murk, the human hulk who suddenly had
become of some use in the world.

But he did not get a chance to go to the hotel just then. He came to a
busy corner, and stopped to wait for a chance to cross the street
congested with traffic. Suddenly, a few feet to his right, he saw Kate
Gilbert, who had left her apartment only a short time before.

There was nothing startling in that fact alone, for this was a district
where there were fashionable shops and beauty parlors, and well-dressed
women were on every side.

What interested Detective Jim Farland the most was that Kate Gilbert was
standing before the show window of a fashionable