and zeal to outweigh
their possible incompetence and lack of discretion, but the stolid
German girl had apparently been so clumsy at her task as to bring
failure upon his plan.

"So much for amateurs!" he murmured to himself, disgustedly. "The
other three will be discharged as soon as excuses for their dismissal
can be manufactured now. My only hope from any of them is that French
governess. If she will only land Paddington I don't care what
suspicions the other three arouse."

Margaret Hefferman's placid face was a little pale when she greeted
him in the ladies' room of the department store a short time later.

"I'm so sorry, Mr. Blaine!" she exclaimed, but in carefully lowered
tones. "I could have cut my right hand off before I would hurt Miss
Lawton after all she has done for me, and already the first thing she
asks, I must fail to do!"

"You are sure you were not followed?" asked the detective, disregarding
her lamentations with purposeful brusqueness, for the tears stood in
her soft, bovine eyes, and he feared an emotional outburst which would
draw down upon them the attention of the whole room.

"Oh, no! I made sure of that. I rode uptown and half-way down again to
be certain, and then changed to the east-side line."

"Very well." He drew her to a secluded window-seat where, themselves
almost unseen, they could obtain an unobstructed view of the entrance
door and of their immediate neighbors.

"Now tell me all about it, Miss Hefferman."

"It was that office boy, Billy," she began. "Such sharp eyes and soft
walk, like a cat! Always he is yawning and sleepy--who would think he
was a spy?"

Her tone was filled with such contempt that involuntarily the
detective's mobile lips twitched. The girl had evidently quite lost
sight of the fact that she herself had occupied the very position in
the pseudo employ of Bertrand Rockamore which she derided in his
office boy.

He did not attempt to guide her in her narrative of the morning's
events, observing that she was too much agitated to give him a
coherent account. Instead, he waited patiently for her to vent her
indignation and tell him in her own way the substance of what had
occurred.

"I had no thought of being watched, else I should have been more
careful," she went on, resentfully. "This morning, only, he was
late--that Billy--and I did not report him. I was busy, too, for there
was more correspondence than usual to attend to, and Mr. Rockamore was
irri