t was not clear to his mind. Joicey had cleared the
Chinaman of complicity, and had knocked the whole structure of carefully
selected evidence away with a few words.

Coryndon was back in Hartley's bungalow with this to consider; and it
left him in a strange place, miles from any conclusion. He had sighted
the end of his labours, seen the reward of his long secret watchfulness,
and now they had withdrawn again beyond his grasp. Heath had seen
Absalom with the Chinaman's assistant. Joicey, whose evidence marked a
later hour than that of Heath, had seen him alone, and the solitary
figure of the small boy hurrying into the dark was the last record that
indicated the way he had gone.

Nothing connected itself with the picture as Coryndon sat brooding over
it, and then gradually his mind cleared and the confusion of the
destruction of his carefully worked-out plan departed from his brain
like a wind-blown cloud. There was a link, and his sensitive fine
fingers caught it suddenly, the very shock of contact sending the blood
into his cheeks.

The picture was clear now. Absalom, a little white-clad figure, slim,
eager and dutiful, hurried into the shadows of night, but Coryndon was
at his heels this time. The clue was so tiny, so infinitesimal, that it
took the eye of a man trained to the last inch in the habit of seeing
everything to notice it, but it did not escape Coryndon.

He joined Hartley at tea in the sitting-room, with its semi-official air
of being used for serious work, and Hartley fulfilled his avocation by
bringing Coryndon back from strange places into the heart of sane
humdrum existence. Surely if some men are pillars, and others rockets,
and more poets, professors and preachers, some are hand-rails, and only
the man who has just been standing on a dizzy height looking sheer into
the bottomless pit where nothing is safe and where life crumbles and
fear is too close to the consciousness, knows the value and even the
beauty of a hand-rail, and knows that there is no need to mock at its
limitations. For a few minutes Coryndon leant upon the moral support of
Hartley's cheery personality, and then he told him that he was going
back to the Bazaar that night, as circumstances led him to believe that
he might find what he wanted there and there only.

"That means that you have cleared Heath?"

Hartley's voice was relieved.

"Heath is entirely exonerated."

Coryndon wandered to the piano, and he played the twilig