e begins slowly and does not know
how to stop. Talk with him drags on endlessly.

"Well, I admit it," I snapped. "It's not a secret."

He lowered his voice. "Do you happen to have noticed a walking-stick in
the library when you were here?"

"Which walking-stick?"

"You know. The one we--"

"Yes. I saw it."

"You didn't, by any chance, take it home with you?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Certainly I'm sure."

"You are an absent-minded beggar, you know," he explained. "You remember
about the fire-tongs. And a stick is like an umbrella. One is likely to
pick it up and--"

"One is not likely to do anything of the sort. At least, I didn't."

"Oh, all right. Every one well?"

"Very well, thanks."

"Suppose we'll see you tonight?"

"Not unless you ring off and let me do some work," I said irritably.

He rang off. I was ruffled, I admit; but I was uneasy, also. To tell the
truth, the affair of the fire-tongs had cost me my self-confidence. I
called up my wife, and she said Herbert was a fool and Sperry also. But
she made an exhaustive search of the premises, without result. Whoever
had taken the stick, I was cleared. Cleared, at least, for a time. There
were strange developments coming that threatened my peace of mind.

It was that day that I discovered that I was being watched. Shadowed,
I believe is the technical word. I daresay I had been followed from my
house, but I had not noticed. When I went out to lunch a youngish man in
a dark overcoat was waiting for the elevator, and I saw him again when I
came out of my house. We went downtown again on the same car.

Perhaps I would have thought nothing of it, had I not been summoned to
the suburbs on a piece of business concerning a mortgage. He was at the
far end of the platform as I took the train to return to the city, with
his back to me. I lost him in the crowd at the downtown station, but he
evidently had not lost me, for, stopping to buy a newspaper, I turned,
and, as my pause had evidently been unexpected, he almost ran into me.

With that tendency of any man who finds himself under suspicion to
search his past for some dereliction, possibly forgotten, I puzzled over
the situation for some time that afternoon. I did not connect it with
the Wells case, for in that matter I was indisputably the hunter, not
the hunted.

Although I found no explanation for the matter, I did not tell my wife
that evening. Women are strange and she would, I feared, immedia