tle, two-thirds full of white powder. It bore
a label printed neatly like the address--

"Herr Van de Greutz's Explosive.

"Formula as he said it...."

For a moment Rawson-Clew held the bottle, staring at it in blank
astonishment; so tense was his attitude that it caught the other man's
attention.

"Hullo!" he said, "some one sent you an infernal machine?"

Rawson-Clew roused himself. "No," he answered shortly.

He put the bottle back in the box after he had felt in the packing and
found nothing, then he fastened it up with more care than was perhaps
necessary. He looked at the address on the lid, but it told him
nothing more than it had at first; neither that nor the name of the
post-office from which it was sent gave any clue to the sender. And
yet he felt as if Julia were at his elbow with that mute sympathy in
her eyes which had been there when they talked of failure in the wood
on the Dunes.

He rose, and taking the box, went towards the door; the other man
watched him curiously. "One would think you had found a ghost in your
box," he said.

"I'm not sure that I have not," Rawson-Clew looked back to answer;
"the ghost of a good comrade."

Then he went home.

When he was alone in his chambers and secure from interruption, he
opened the box again and took out all the packing, carefully sorting
it. But he found nothing, no scrap of paper, no clue of any sort; he
took off the linen rag that fastened in the bottle stopper, but that
betrayed nothing either; and yet he thought of Julia.

She was the only person who could know about the explosive. It had
never been actually spoken of last summer, but the chances were she
knew. She was the only person who could have known or who could have
got it. It was like her, so like that he was as sure as if her name
were in the box that she was the sender. How she had got the stuff he
could not think, he knew the difficulties in the way; but she had done
it somehow, and now she had sent it to him, without name for fear of
embarrassing him, without clue, with no desire for thanks--loyal,
generous, able little comrade! He looked up again; he felt as if she
were bodily present; the whole thing, astounding as he had found it at
first, was somehow so characteristic of her. And because of her
presence he suddenly wished he had not been to that evening's
entertainment and sat close by his cousin's wife and heard the things
she said, and answered the things she looked. He felt