omen, to have
brought matters to a head.

We chatted for a few minutes, Kennedy deftly refusing to commit himself
on anything, Mrs. Barry seeking to lead him into expressing some
opinion, and endeavoring to conceal her exasperation as he avoided doing
so.

At last Kennedy glanced at his watch, which reminded him of a mythical
appointment, sufficient to terminate the visit.

"I'm very glad to have met you," he bowed to Mrs. Barry, as she, too,
rose to go, while he preserved the fiction of merely having dropped in
to see Miss Laidlaw. He turned to her. "I should be delighted to have
both you and Mr. Tresham drop in at my laboratory some time, Miss
Laidlaw."

Miss Laidlaw caught his eye and read in it that this was his way, under
the circumstances, of asking her to keep in touch with him.

"I shall do so," she promised.

We parted from Mrs. Barry at the door of her taxicab.

"A very baffling woman," I remarked a moment later. "Do you suppose she
is as intimate with Creighton as she implies?"

Kennedy shook his head. "It isn't that that interests me most, just
now," he replied. "What I can't figure out is Adele Laidlaw's attitude
toward both Creighton and Tresham. She seems to resent Mrs. Barry's
intimacy with either."

"Yes," I agreed. "Sometimes I have thought she really cared for both--at
least, that she was unable to make up her mind which she cared for most.
Offhand, I should have thought that she was the sort who wouldn't think
a man worth caring much for."

Kennedy shook his head. "Given a woman, Walter," he said thoughtfully,
"whose own and ancestral training has been a course of suppression,
where she has been taught and drilled that exhibitions of emotion and
passion are disgraceful, as I suspect Miss Laidlaw's parents have
believed, and you have a woman whose primitive instincts have been
stored and strengthened. The instincts are there, nevertheless, far back
in the subconscious mind. I don't think Adele Laidlaw knows it herself,
but there is something about both those men which fascinates her and she
can't make up her mind which fascinates her most. Perhaps they have the
same qualities."

"But Mrs. Barry," I interrupted. "Surely she must know."

"I think she does," he returned. "I think she knows more than we
suspect."

I looked at him quickly, not quite making out the significance of the
remark, but he said no more. For the present, at least, he left Adele
Laidlaw quite as much an enigma as e