“THE first confirmatory evidence of the thing, Excellency, was the print of a woman's bare foot.” He was an immense creature. He sat in an upright chair that seemed to have been provided especially for him. The great bulk of him flowed out and filled the chair. It did not seem to be fat that enveloped him. It seemed rather to be some soft, tough fiber, like the pudgy mass making up the body of a deep-sea thing. One got an impression of strength. The country was before the open window; the cluste

I was before one of those difficult positions unavoidable to a visitor in a foreign country. I had to meet the obligations of professional courtesy. Captain Walker had asked me to go over the manuscript of his memoirs; and now he had called at the house in which I was a guest, for my opinion. We had long been friends; associated in innumerable cases, and I wished to suggest the difficulty rather than to express it. It was the twilight of an early Washington winter. The lights in the great librar

It was a remark of old Major Carrington that incited this adventure. “It is some distance through the wood—is she quite safe?” It was a mere reflection as he went out. It was very late. I do not know how the dinner, or rather the after-hours of it, had lengthened. It must have been the incomparable charm of the woman. She had come, this night, luminously, it seemed to us, through the haze that had been on her—the smoke haze of a strange, blighting fortune. The three of us had been carried along

I shall not pretend that I knew the man in America or that he was a friend of my family or that some one had written to me about him. The plain truth is that I never laid eyes on him until Sir Henry Marquis pointed him out to me the day after I went down from here to London. It was in Piccadilly Circus. “There's your American,” said Sir Henry. The girl paused for a few moments. There was profound silence. “And that isn't all of it. Nobody presented him to me. I deliberately picked him up!” Three

“Alas, monsieur, in spite of our fine courtesies, the conception of justice by one race must always seem outlandish to another!” It was on the terrace of Sir Henry Marquis' villa at Cannes. The members of the little party were in conversation over their tobacco—the Englishman, with his brier-root pipe; the American Justice, with a Havana cigar; and the aged Italian, with his cigarette. The last was speaking. He was a very old man, but he gave one the impression of incredible, preposterous age. H

It was an ancient diary in a faded leather cover. The writing was fine and delicate, and the ink yellow with age. Sir Henry Marquis turned the pages slowly and with care for the paper was fragile. We had dined early at the Ritz and come in later to his great home in St. James's Square. He wished to show me this old diary that had come to him from a branch of his mother's family in Virginia—a branch that had gone out with a King's grant when Virginia was a crown colony. The collateral ancestor, P

Sir Henry Marquis continued to read; he made no comment; his voice clear and even. It was a big sunny room. The long windows looked out on a formal garden, great beech trees and the bow of the river. Within it was a sort of library. There were bookcases built into the wall, to the height of a man's head, and at intervals between them, rising from the floor to the cornice of the shelves, were rows of mahogany drawers with glass knobs. There was also a flat writing table. It was the room of a trav

Sir Henry paused a moment, his finger between the pages of the ancient diary. “It is the inspirational quality in these cases,” he said, “that impresses me. It is very nearly absent in our modern methods of criminal investigation. We depend now on a certain formal routine. I rarely find a man in the whole of Scotland Yard with a trace of intuitive impulse to lead him.... Observe how this old justice in Virginia bridged the gaps between his incidents.” He paused. “We call it the inspirational ins

The man laughed. It was a faint cynical murmur of a laugh. Its expression hardly disturbed the composition of his features. “I fear, Lady Muriel,” he said, “that your profession is ruined. Our friend—'over the water'—is no longer concerned about the affairs of England.” The woman fingered at her gloves, turning them back about the wrists. Her face was anxious and drawn. “I am rather desperately in need of money,” she said. The cynicism deepened in the man's face. “Unfortunately,” he replied, “a

The talk had run on treasure. I could not sleep and my friends had dropped in. I had the big South room on the second floor of the Hotel de Paris. It looks down on the Casino and the Mediterranean. Perhaps you know it. Queer friends, you'd say. Every man-jack of them a gambler. But when one begins to sit about all night with his eyes open, the devil's a friend. Barclay was standing before the fire. The others had drifted out. He's a big man pitted with the smallpox. He made a gesture, flinging o

The thing began in the colony room of the Empire Club in London. The colony room is on the second floor and looks out over Piccadilly Circus. It was at an hour when nobody is in an English club. There was a drift of dirty fog outside. Such nights come along in October. Douglas Hargrave did not see the Baronet until he closed the door behind him. Sir Henry was seated at a table, leaning over, his face between his hand, and his elbows resting on the polished mahogany board. There was a sheet of pa

It was after dinner, in the great house of Sir Henry Marquis in St. James's Square. The talk had run on the value of women in criminal investigation; their skill as detective agents... the suitability of the feminine intelligence to the hard, accurate labor of concrete deductions. It was the American Ambassadress, Lisa Lewis, who told the story. It was a fairy night, and the thing was a fairy story. The sun had merely gone behind a colored window. The whole vault of the heaven was white with sta

The story of the American Ambassadress was not the only one related on this night. Sir Henry Marquis himself added another, in support of the contention of his guest... and from her own country. The lawyer walked about the room. The restraint which he had assumed was now quite abandoned. “That's all there is to it,” he said. “I'm not trying this case for amusement. You have the money to pay me and you must bring it up here now, tonight.” The woman sat in a chair beyond the table. She was young,

The girl sat in a great chair before the fire, huddled, staring into the glow of the smoldering logs. Her dark hair clouded her face. The evening gown was twisted and crumpled about her. There was no ornament on her; her arms, her shoulders, the exquisite column of her throat were bare. She sat with her eyes wide, unmoving, in a profound reflection. The library was softly lighted; richly furnished, a little beyond the permission of good taste. On a table at the girl's elbow were two objects; a r

The Baronet did not at once reply. He looked out over the English country through the ancient oak-trees, above the sweep of meadow across the dark, creeping river, to the white shaft rising beyond the wooded hills into the sky. The war was over. I was a guest of Sir Henry Marquis for a week-end at his country-house. The man fascinated me. He seemed a sort of bottomless Stygian vat of mysteries. He had been the secret hand of England for many years in India. Then he was made a Baronet and put at

There was a snapping fire in the chimney. I was cold through and I was glad to stand close beside it on the stone hearth. My greatcoat had kept out the rain, but it had not kept out the chill of the West Highland night. I shivered before the fire, my hands held out to the flame. It was a long, low room. There was an ancient guncase on one side, but the racks were empty except for a service pistol hanging by its trigger-guard from the hook. There were some shelves of books on the other side. But