uty of
every man who writes for a newspaper, to turn himself into a reporter
when a story breaks under his eye. Jimmy ought that very night as soon
as he had made sure of his facts, to have left a note on his city
editor's desk informing him that Mrs. Rodney Aldrich was a member of the
chorus in the new Globe show.

He didn't do it, even though he knew that a more troublesome accuser
than his own conscience--namely, the city editor himself--would confront
him, in case any of his colleagues on the other papers had happened to
recognize her and, dutifully, had turned the story in. He read the other
papers for the next twenty-four hours, rather more carefully than usual,
and then with a sigh of relief, told his conscience to go to the devil.
It was a well trained, obedient conscience, and it subsided meekly.

But his curiosity was neither meek nor accustomed to having its
liberties interfered with, and it declined to leave the problem alone.
Problem! It was a whole nest of problems. If you isolated one and worked
out a tolerably satisfactory answer to it, you discovered that this
answer made all the rest more fantastically impossible of solution than
before. It actually began to cost him sleep! What made it harder to
bear, of course, was the tantalizing possibility of finding out
something by dropping in at the Globe during a performance, wandering
back on the stage, where he was always perfectly welcome, going up and
speaking to her and--seeing what happened. Something more or less
illuminating would have to happen. Because, even in the extremely
improbable case of her pretending she didn't know him, he'd then have
something to go on. He dismissed this temptation as often as it showed
its face around the corner of the door of his mind--dismissed it with
objurgations. But it was a persistent temptation and it wouldn't stay
away.

It was a real relief to him when Violet Williamson telephoned to him one
day and asked him to come out to dinner. There'd be no one but herself
and John, she said, and he needn't dress unless he liked. She'd been in
New York for a fortnight and had only been back two days. He mustn't
fail to come. There was a sort of suppressed excitement about Violet's
voice over the telephone, which led him to suspect she might be able to
throw some light on the enigma.

But light, it appeared, was what John and Violet wanted from him.

They were both in the library when he came in, and after the barest
pr