wyer, taking up his hat, "but I am afraid
you are encouraging the young rogue to entertain hopes that will only
make his fall the harder--to say nothing of our own position. We don't
want to make ourselves ridiculous in court, you know."

"I don't, certainly," agreed Thorndyke. "However, I will look into the
matter and communicate with you in the course of a day or two."

He stood holding the door open as the lawyer descended the stairs, and
when the footsteps at length died away, he closed it sharply and turned
to me with an air of annoyance.

"The 'young rogue,'" he remarked, "does not appear to me to have been
very happy in his choice of a solicitor. By the way, Jervis, I
understand you are out of employment just now?"

"That is so," I answered.

"Would you care to help me--as a matter of business, of course--to work
up this case? I have a lot of other work on hand and your assistance
would be of great value to me."

I said, with great truth, that I should be delighted.

"Then," said Thorndyke, "come round to breakfast to-morrow and we will
settle the terms, and you can commence your duties at once. And now let
us light our pipes and finish our yarns as though agitated clients and
thick-headed solicitors had no existence."

CHAPTER III

A LADY IN THE CASE

When I arrived at Thorndyke's chambers on the following morning, I found
my friend already hard at work. Breakfast was laid at one end of the
table, while at the other stood a microscope of the pattern used for
examining plate-cultures of micro-organisms, on the wide stage of which
was one of the cards bearing six thumb-prints in blood. A condenser
threw a bright spot of light on the card, which Thorndyke had been
examining when I knocked, as I gathered from the position of the chair,
which he now pushed back against the wall.

"I see you have commenced work on our problem," I remarked as, in
response to a double ring of the electric bell, Polton entered with the
materials for our repast.

"Yes," answered Thorndyke. "I have opened the campaign, supported, as
usual, by my trusty chief-of-staff; eh! Polton?"

The little man, whose intellectual, refined countenance and dignified
bearing seemed oddly out of character with the tea-tray that he carried,
smiled proudly, and, with a glance of affectionate admiration at my
friend, replied--

"Yes, sir. We haven't been letting the grass grow under our feet.
There's a beautiful negative washing upsta