ly?" asked the demon detective. "Yet--you're in that room,
I take it? Yet you got out of bed immediately after and walked in here;
I heard your step. Don't flush, Boller! It takes practice to carry out a
thing of this kind and whatever the motive may have been, you gentlemen
are not old hands. And so to item three: it must have been about four
when a policeman came to this door. _Why?_"

"There was supposed to be a burglar here. It was a false alarm," Anthony
said, less collectedly.

Hitchin lighted the pipe he had filled and smiled.

"That is the tale they tell in the office," he said. "I confess that
that detail puzzles me and as yet I haven't had time to get inside
information from my good friend our police captain. However, we can well
call this detail immaterial and pass to item four."

He gazed into the blue cloud of smoke and smiled again.

"The woman in the case!" he said in a deep, bass voice.

"There was no woman!" Anthony exploded. "And----"

"The Frenchwoman, Fry!" Hitchin corrected.

"Well, she----"

"Don't explain her," said Hobart Hitchin. "Let us see just what happened
when she was about. She came after daylight. She passed through the
office downstairs so suddenly that nobody was able to stop her, and she
knew where to come. She was in the elevator naming her floor to the
man--who supposed her to have been passed by the office--perhaps two
seconds after she entered the house itself. She came directly to this
apartment, Fry, and almost immediately she burst into hysterical
weeping!"

His eyes were boring again and Hobart Hitchin also pointed the stem of
his pipe accusingly at Anthony.

"Fry," he said, "what did that girl _see_, evidently at the end of the
corridor, which produced that outburst of grief?"

"Nothing," Anthony said thickly.

"There was nothing to cause her acute grief?"

"No, and----"

"Wait! She wept all the way down in the elevator; I saw her myself! She
wept so violently when she reached the street that an officer approached
her--and she fled from him and disappeared."

It was high time to say something and to say it well. Dignity had always
served Anthony, and while it was an effort he eyed Hobart Hitchin
coldly.

"Hitchin," said he, "it would be quite possible, believe me, to soothe
your feverish mind by telling you the perfectly simple errand on which
that girl came, but I'm damned if I'll do it! Some things are too
ridiculous, and you're one of them. If there ar