unfaltering.

"I would have known during the next half-hour, at least," she said. "An
inclined mirror hangs in my room. I use it sometimes for adjusting a hat.
The square of light from Mr. Grant's room is reflected in it, and any
sudden increase in the illumination caused by opening the window or
pulling the curtains aside would certainly have caught my eye."

"You have an unshakable witness in Miss Martin," said Furneaux, stabbing
a finger at Grant. "Now, I'll hurry off. You and I, Mr. Grant, meet at
Philippi, otherwise known as the crowner's quest."

Any benevolent intent he may have had in leaving these young people
together was, however, frustrated by Doris, whose composure seemed to
have fled since her statement about the mirror. She resolutely
accompanied the detective, and Grant had to follow. All three passed into
the post office, Doris using the private door. Mr. Martin looked up from
his desk when they appeared, and requested his daughter to check a bundle
of postal orders. The pretext was painfully obvious, but Grant was not so
wishful now to clear up matters with Doris's father, as the girl herself
might be trusted to pass on an accurate account of the affair from
beginning to end.

He was about to reach the street quick on Furneaux's heels when the
little man turned suddenly.

"By the way, don't you want a shilling's worth of stamps?" he said.

Grant smiled comprehension, and went back to the counter, where Doris
herself served him. She did not try to avoid his glance, but rather met
it with a baffling serenity oddly at variance with her momentary loss of
self-possession in the garden.

When he entered the street the detective had vanished.

He walked down the hill at a rapid pace, disregarding the eyes peeping
at him through open doorways, over narrow window-curtains, and covertly
staring when people passed in the roadway. The sensitive side of his
temperament shrank from this thinly-veiled hostility. He was by way of
being popular in Steynholme, yet not a soul spoke to him. Before he
reached the bridge, the other side of him, the man of action, of cool
resource in an emergency, rose in rebellion against the league of silly
clodhoppers. Back he strode to the post office and dashed off a
telegram. It ran:

"Walter Hart, Savage Club, Adelphi, London. Come here and help to
lay a ghost."

He signed it in full, name and address. Doris was gone, but her father
received it, and read the text in a bew