ive."

"And after that, what?"

"I'll get a job. I suppose a man is as well hidden here as anywhere. I
can grow a beard-that's the usual thing, isn't it?"

Bassett made an impatient gesture, and fell to pacing the floor. "It's
incredible," he said. "It's monstrous. It's a joke. Here you are,
without a thing against you, and hung like Mahomet's coffin between
heaven and earth. It makes me sick."

He went home that night, leaving word to have any letters for L 22
forwarded, but without much hope. His last clutch of Dick's hand had a
sort of desperate finality in it, and he carried with him most of the
way home the tall, worn and rather shabby figure that saw him off with a
smile.

By the next afternoon's mail he received a note from New York, with a
few words of comment penciled on it in Dick's writing. "This came this
evening. I sent back the money. D." The note was from Gregory and
had evidently enclosed a one-hundred dollar bill. It began without
superscription: "Enclosed find a hundred dollars, as I imagine funds may
be short. If I were you I'd get out of here. There has been considerable
excitement, and you know too many people in this burg."

Bassett sat back in his chair and studied the note.

"Now why the devil did he do that?" he reflected. He sat for some time,
thinking deeply, and he came to one important conclusion. The story
Gregory had told was the one which was absolutely calculated to shut
off all further inquiry. They had had ten years; ten years to plan,
eliminate and construct; ten years to prepare their defense, in case
Clark turned up. Wasn't that why Gregory had been so assured? But he had
not been content to let well enough alone; he had perhaps overreached
himself.

Then what was the answer? She had killed Lucas, but was it an accident?
And there must have been a witness, or they would have had nothing to
fear. He wrote out on a bit of paper three names, and sat looking at
them:

Hattie Thorwald Jean Melis Clifton Hines.

XLII

Elizabeth had quite definitely put Dick out of her heart. On the evening
of the day she learned he had come back and had not seen her, she
deliberately killed her love and decently interred it. She burned her
notes and his one letter and put away her ring, performing the rites not
as rites but as a shameful business to be done with quickly. She tore
his photograph into bits and threw them into her waste basket, and
having thus housecleaned her room set t