n of the enigma--for enigma it certainly
is."

"You agree with me, then, that poor Harry was the victim of foul play?"
she asked in a low, intense voice, eagerly watching his face the while.

"Yes," he answered very slowly, "and, further, that the woman who visited
him that afternoon was an accessory. Harry Bellairs was _murdered_!"

Her cheeks blanched and she went pale to the lips. He saw the sudden
change in her, and realised what a supreme effort she was making to
betray no undue alarm. But the effect of his cold, calm words had been
almost electrical. He watched her countenance slowly flushing, but
pretended not to notice her confusion. And so he walked on at her side,
full of wonderment.

How much did she know? Why, indeed, had Harry Bellairs fallen the victim
of a secret assassin?

No trained officer of the Criminal Investigation Department was more
ingenious in making secret inquiries, more clever in his subterfuges or
in disguising his real objects, than Walter Fetherston. Possessed of
ample means, and member of that secret club called "Our Society," which
meets at intervals and is the club of criminologists, and pursuing the
detection of crime as a pastime, he had on many occasions placed Scotland
Yard and the Surete in Paris in possession of information which had
amazed them and which had earned for him the high esteem of those in
office as Ministers of the Interior in Paris, Rome and in London.

The case of Captain Henry Bellairs he had taken up merely because he
recognised in it some unusual circumstances, and without sparing effort
he had investigated it rapidly and secretly from every standpoint. He had
satisfied himself. Certain knowledge that he had was not possessed by any
officer at Scotland Yard, and only by reason of that secret knowledge had
he been able to arrive at the definite conclusion that there had been a
strong motive for the captain's death, and that if he had been secretly
poisoned--which seemed to be the case, in spite of the analysts'
evidence--then he had been poisoned by the velvet hand of a woman.

Walter Fetherston was ever regretting his inability to put any of the
confidential information he acquired into his books.

"If I could only write half the truth of what I know, people would
declare it to be fiction," he had often assured intimate friends. And
those friends had pondered and wondered to what he referred.

He wrote of crime, weaving those wonderful romances which he