f takes hold of you if you've ever even shaken hands with
either of the parties concerned in it."

"Did you see much of the poor fellow during the voyage?" Sir Charles
asked.

"No, nor any one else," Mr. Coulson replied. "I don't think he was
seasick, but he was miserably unsociable, and he seldom left his cabin.
I doubt whether there were half a dozen people on board who would have
recognized him afterwards as a fellow-passenger."

"He seems to have been a secretive sort of person," Sir Charles
remarked.

"He was that," Mr. Coulson admitted. "Never seemed to care to talk about
himself or his own business. Not that he had much to talk about," he
added reflectively. "Dull sort of life, his. So many hours of work, so
many hours of play; so many dollars a month, and after it's all over, so
many dollars pension. Wouldn't suit all of us, Sir Charles, eh?"

"I fancy not," Somerfield admitted. "Perhaps he kicked over the traces
a bit when he was over this side. You Americans generally seem to find
your way about--in Paris, especially."

Mr. Coulson shook his head doubtfully.

"There wasn't much kicking over the traces with poor old Fynes," he
said. "He hadn't got it in him."

Somerfield scratched his chin thoughtfully and looked at Penelope.

"Scarcely seems possible, does it," he remarked, "that a man leading
such a quiet sort of life should make enemies."

"I don't believe he had any," Mr. Coulson asserted.

"He didn't seem nervous on the way over, did he?" Penelope asked,--"as
though he were afraid of something happening?"

Mr. Coulson shook his head.

"No more than usual," he answered. "I guess your police over here aren't
quite so smart as ours, or they'd have been on the track of this thing
before now. But you can take it from me that when the truth comes out
you'll find that our poor friend has paid the penalty of going about the
world like a crank."

"A what?" Somerfield asked doubtfully.

"A crank," Mr. Coulson repeated vigorously. "It wasn't much I knew
of Hamilton Fynes, but I knew that much. He was one of those nervous,
stand-off sort of persons who hated to have people talk to him and
yet was always doing things to make them talk about him. I was over in
Europe with him not so long ago, and he went on in the same way. Took
a special train to Dover when there wasn't any earthly reason for it;
travelled with a valet and a courier, when he had no clothes for the
valet to look after, and spoke every