et through her rain-coat
sleeves as she leant far over to make doubly sure what she object was; but
indeed she had not a moment's doubt but that it was the missing camera of
the murdered man.

AFTER THE FAIR

Mr. Upton was dumfoundered when the top-floor door in Glasshouse Street
was opened before Eugene Thrush could insert his key; for it was the
sombre Mullins who admitted the gentleman as though nothing had happened
to him except a fairly recent shave.

"I thought he was in prison?" exclaimed the ironmaster when the two were
closeted.

"Do you ever read your paper?"

"I haven't looked at one since Plymouth."

"Well, I howked him out first thing yesterday morning."

"_You_ did, Thrush?"

"Why not? I had need of the fellow, and that part of the game was up."

Mr. Upton showed symptoms of his old irritability under the Thrush
mannerism.

"My good fellow, I wish to goodness you'd explain yourself!"

"If I cared to be profane," returned Thrush, mixing drinks in the corner,
"I should refer you to the first chapter of the Book of Job. I provided
the prisoner, and I'd a perfect right to take him away again. Blessed be
the song of the Thrush!"

"You say you provided him?"

"In other words, I laid the information against my own man, but only with
his own consent."

"Well, well, you must have your joke, I suppose. I can afford to put up
with it now."

"It wasn't meant as a joke," returned Thrush, and drank deep while his
client sipped. "If it had come off it would have been the coup of my
career; as it didn't--quite--one must laugh it off at one's own expense.
Your son has told you what that poor old sinner made him think he'd done?"

"Of course."

"Would it surprise you to hear that one or two others thought the same
thing?"

"Not you, Thrush?"

"Not I to quite the same positive extent as my rascal Mullins. He jumped
to it from scratch!"

"He connected Tony with the Park murder?"

"From the word 'go.' "

"On the strength of an asthma cigarette and my poor wife's dream?"

"No; he didn't know about the dream. But he refused to believe in two
independent mysteries at one time and on one spot. The eternal unities
was too many measles for Mullins, though he never heard tell of 'em in his
life."

Mr. Upton was no longer irritated by the other's flippancy. He looked at
Thrush with a shining face.

"And you never told me what was in your minds!"

"It was poison even in mine; it wo