ds of the boarding houses. I think you'd like to get your hands
on a customer as slippery as Withers says that man is."

"I'll send Jenkins at once," the chief took his directions in good part.

"Good again. By the way, you'll be up here at four?"

"No; five. Dr. Braley told me we'd have to wait until then; said we'd
better. He wants her to get that extra hour's sleep."

Bristow started to say something further, hesitated and then hung up the
receiver with a word of assent.

Mattie had come in to clear off the table.

"Go down to Number Six," he told her, "and ask Mrs. Allen if she will be
so kind as to come up here at her earliest convenience. Explain to her
that it's against the doctor's orders for me to leave this house, and
that the excitement of this morning has tired me out."

Mrs. Allen appeared in less than a quarter of an hour. He received her in
the living room and introduced himself, apologizing for not having been
able to call on her. She understood perfectly, she said.

She was a woman about forty years of age, her face a little thin and
worn, a good deal of gray in her dark hair. She had been nursing her
husband for two years, and the strain had begun to tell. Nevertheless,
he soon saw that she was a woman of refinement, possessed of a keen
intelligence.

"I wish," he requested, after he had explained his connection with the
murder, "you'd tell me all you know about these sisters. I gathered this
morning that you were well acquainted with them."

He had always found it easy to gain the confidence of women. They liked
his manners, his air of deference, his manifest interest in everything
they said.

"I can't say that I've been intimate with them," Mrs. Allen explained in
her soft, pleasing voice; "but Mrs. Withers and I knew each other pretty
well. She came over to my house quite frequently, and I was in the habit
of running in to see her."

"Don't you know the other, Miss Fulton, equally well?"

"No. You see, she was always in, or on, the bed, and she never seemed to
want to talk. Besides, she was different from Mrs. Withers--not so bright
and attractive, and not so neighbourly."

"Mrs. Withers was always a laughing, sparkling sort of a person, wasn't
she?"

"She gave that impression to some people," Mrs. Allen answered
thoughtfully, "but not to me. It was her nature to be free and happy.
Most of the time she seemed that way. But there were other times when
I could see that she had someth