you had your umbrella."

"Certainly not," I said with dignity. "I assure you, my dear--"

"I am not a curious woman," she put in incisively, "but when my husband
spends an evening out, and returns minus his overcoat, with his hat
mashed, a lump the size of an egg over his ear, and puts a pair of
fire-tongs in the umbrella stand under the impression that it is an
umbrella, I have a right to ask at least if he intends to continue his
life of debauchery."

I made a mistake then. I should have told her. Instead, I took my broken
hat and jammed it on my head with a force that made the lump she had
noticed jump like a toothache, and went out.

When, at noon and luncheon, I tried to tell her the truth, she listened
to the end: Then: "I should think you could have done better than that,"
she said. "You have had all morning to think it out."

However, if things were in a state of armed neutrality at home, I had
a certain compensation for them when I told my story to Sperry that
afternoon.

"You see how it is," I finished. "You can stay out of this, or come in,
Sperry, but I cannot stop now. He was murdered beyond a doubt, and
there is an intelligent effort being made to eliminate every particle of
evidence."

He nodded.

"It looks like it. And this man who was there last night--"

"Why a man?"

"He took your overcoat, instead of his own, didn't he? It may have
been--it's curious, isn't it, that we've had no suggestion of Ellingham
in all the rest of the material."

Like the other members of the Neighborhood Club, he had a copy of the
proceedings at the two seances, and now he brought them out and fell to
studying them.

"She was right about the bullet in the ceiling," he reflected. "I
suppose you didn't look for the box of shells for the revolver?"

"I meant to, but it slipped my mind."

He shuffled the loose pages of the record. "Cane--washed away by
the water--a knee that is hurt--the curtain would have been safer
--Hawkins--the drawing-room furniture is all over the house. That last,
Horace, isn't pertinent. It refers clearly to the room we were in. Of
course, the point is, how much of the rest is also extraneous matter?"
He re-read one of the sheets. "Of course that belongs, about Hawkins.
And probably this: 'It will be terrible if the letters are found.' They
were in the pocketbook, presumably."

He folded up the papers and replaced them in a drawer.

"We'd better go back to the house," he said. "Whoev