am sure I should not mind anybody in the world knowing what
was inside my boxes. Now, Miss Smith, I think your room is No. 46, is it
not? So if you will be kind enough to give me your keys, and----If you
would not mind stepping with us across the corridor----"

Here I found voice.

"You really mean it?" I said. "You want to search my trunks?"

"Merely as a matter of form," repeated the manager a little more
insistently. "I am sure a young lady like you would not mind who knew
what was in her trunks."

I stood there, one hand still full of the red carnations that I was
rearranging, the other gripping the end of the pink couch. I was
thinking at lightning speed even as the frock-coated, shrewd-eyed,
suave-voiced manager was speaking.

My trunks?

Well, as far as that went, I had only one trunk to my name! For I had
given Mackenzie, the sandy-haired chamber-maid, all the luggage which
had known me in Putney.

When she asked me what she was to do with it, I told her she could give
it to the dustman to take away, or cut it up for lighting the fires
with, or anything she liked. She had said, "Very good" in a wooden tone
that I knew masked surprise and wonderment unceasing over the
inhabitants of Nos. 44, 45, and 46. Consequently I had, as I say, only
one single trunk in the whole wide world.

And that was the brand-new masterpiece of the trunkmaker's art, bought
in Bond Street, and handed over to me for my use by Miss Million on the
ill-fated day when we first arrived at the Cecil.

As for what was in it----

Well, in one of Miss Million's own idioms, "It was full of emptiness"!

There was not a thing in it but the incorporate air and the
expensive-smelling perfume of very good new leather!

As the luggage of a modest lady's-maid it was really too
eccentric-looking to display to the suspicious eyes of the four men who
waited there in Miss Million's sitting-room confronting me. I protested
incoherently: "Oh, I don't think I can let you----"

"Ah!" said the stout Jewish gentleman, with a vicious glance from me to
the Scotland Yard detective, "this don't seem a case of a very clear
conscience!"

The manager put up a deprecating hand.

"A little quietly, sir, if you please. I am sure Miss Smith will see
that it is quite as much for her own benefit to let us just give a bit
of a look through her things."

Her "things!" There, again, was something rather embarrassing. The fact
was I had so ridiculously f