paces or more, and fell forward, face downward, on the pavement. Quick as Moale was to follow, he found Snedecor already standing over the man when he reached him, and knew instinctively what had happened.

"Damn him!" said the American, savagely, as he replaced his smoking revolver in his hip-pocket, "he's given me the slip twice, and that's enough. No man gets away from me three times running, unless he draws first."

The street was already swarming with a crowd that had closed in from every direction, and Moale, taking Snedecor by the arm, had Beveridge, who was still breathing faintly, carried into a chemist's shop close at hand. The inspector, who had turned over Sondheim to one of his men, followed, and the man who had been so unceremoniously felled by Beveridge, took the door and savagely repelled the mob of curious spectators. Beveridge had been laid upon his back on the floor, and the chemist, bending over him, had torn open his shirt at the neck in his search for the wound, when Snedecor, who had been watching him, unmoved, suddenly shook himself free from Moale and stooped over, gazing intently at the uncovered throat.

its brutality, had begun to shape itself in his mind. "Let me take Mr. Snedecor with me," he said hurriedly to the inspector. "I'll be responsible for him. Let me have him for a couple of hours, and I'll make daylight shine through the whole job."

The inspector glanced at him keenly for a moment, and a half light of intelligence passed over his face. "By George!" he exclaimed, irritably, "I seem to see it too, and yet I don't. But do as you like-only get away at once," and Moale, taking the astonished American once more by the arm, hurriedly left the shop, pushed his way roughly through the crowd outside, and called the first cab he saw.

"Is your horse fresh?" he demanded, "peremptorily. "No nonsense, or I'll summons you. This is a matter of life or death."

"Just out, on my word, sir," said the man, earnestly.

"All right," said Moale, shoving Snedecor into the cab and springing in after him. "No. 7, Cheyne Walk-and drive like the devil!"

The man, with that remarkable apprehension of locality which makes the London hansom driver the cleverest man in the world in his vocation, instantly cut for the Mall, swung around past the palace gates, and striking the open stretch of Buckingham Palace. Road, drove furiously south.

Moale, rapidly working out the involved scheme of deviltry that had so suddenly dawned upon him, said nothing for the first few minutes of the drive, and the American sat silently at his side, doggedly staring ahead and nervously gnawing at his mustache. It was not until they had turned into Queen's Road and were nearing their destination, that the detective, moved by a sudden impulse, turned and said, peremptorily, "Give me your revolver." Snedecor surrendered his weapon without objection, and resumed his moody stare ahead until they pulled up in Cheyne Walk, when he drew a long breath and said, with remorseful abstraction, "Poor old Blair," and Moale knew that he had at last divined the truth.

The house, hiding within its walls.

a grewsome probability, seemed to be staring blankly out upon the river with inanimate unconcern, while in the morning sunlight an unheeding tide of life swept eastward and westward before its door. Benning, unconscious of the secret that had defied the watch of the night, was loitering in cover on the opposite side of the way, and Moale, but for his premonition, could have discerned nothing sinister in the absolute quiet that seemed to pervade the premises. In this, however, it required no prescience on his part to detect a certain deadly significance, and peremptorily recalling Benning from his cover, he ran up the steps and rang the bell. Awaiting a response to this summons, Benning reminded him of the absence of the maid, and informed him that the boy employed about the place was also absent on an errand. This left the Baroness, as Moale reflected with a curious thrill, virtually alone in the house, and he rang the bell insistently again and again. At this juncture the boy appeared, running down the street, and promising to admit them without delay, went in through the lower door.

In the interim that followed, Moale and Benning stood on the steps gazing significantly at one another, while Snedecor waited on the walk with his hands in his pockets, staring up at the house. From this point, as he afterward told Moale, he saw the Baroness suddenly appear at an upper window, look down with a startled glance at the group below, and then instantly withdraw. A moment after the door was opened, and the three men entered the house.

The Baroness, clad in a wrapper, stood on the stairs, and surveying the party with every evidence of startled surprise, inquired the meaning of this peremptory visit. Moale, evidently prepared for this, replied that he must see Mr. Beveridge at once on business of imperative importance, and the woman, after gazing at him steadily for a moment, turned and disappeared in the upper hall. A sound of knocking at a door followed, repeated again and again with increasing vehemence, and the Baroness presently reappeared, and with what was apparently a supreme effort at

self-control, began an incoherent explanation, when Moale, with a rapid signal to Benning, pushed by her and ran up the stairs with the American at his heels. There was a strong odor of es caping gas in the upper hall, and Moale, without an instant's hesitation, threw his shoulder against the door of the bed-room and burst it in. The air was almost suffocating with the density of the vapor, and the detective, dashing through the darkened room and overturning several chairs in the obscurity, threw open both windows. He leaned out for a moment to inhale the air, and turning back, shut off the open cock of the burner, and then saw that Snedecor was standing by the bed. With a sudden shrinking from what he now knew was to come, Moale paused and mechanically replaced upon one of the overturned chairs a pile of what he recognized as Beveridge's clothing, and then pulling himself together, stepped to Snedecor's side. The American, who was bending over the inanimate figure lying on the bed, suddenly drew himself up with a colorless face, and pointing to a terrible scar in the neck of the dead man, said, in a broken voice, "It's him. What a damned unholy job!"

True to anticipation, Sondheim weakened at once and told the story. Beve ridge was an Australian gambler who had been broken at Homburg, and his extraordinary resemblance to Blair, afterward accidentally met in Paris, had suggested to the fertile mind of the Baroness the utilization of the likeness. The American was found to have a large sum in ready money, but all attempts to bring this into available play had failed, until his cupidity had been finally aroused by a pretended scheme to purchase a lot of jewels, and resell them at an exorbitant advance to the Baron, that accomplished man contributing a masterly character sketch of a buyer for a Russian countess, with an ostensible willingness to further the transaction and share the profits. The scheme required time and extraordi nary patience, involving a prolonged residence in Cheyne Walk for the purpose of exploiting Beveridge and his

pretended wife, and actually having in view the audacious idea of having the Baroness remain there, as the bereaved widow, for a sufficiently impressive period after Blair's apparently accidental death. Every detail had been worked out with a sort of infernal craft, even down to the device of having a suit of Beveridge's clothes left on the chair at the bedside, Sondheim, with characteristic prudence, having undertaken the conveyance of the unfortunate American's apparel to the Tavistock, so as to leave to the Baroness the grewsome duty of extinguishing and then turning on the gas. Curiously enough, the comparatively commonplace device of

drugging Blair, during the pretended conference at the Baron's apartment, indirectly brought about the wreck of the entire scheme. It was the scrap of paper, given by Sondheim to Blair as a passport to the ostensible lodging-house, and accidentally pulled from Blair's pocket while in his helpless condition, which eventually put Moale directly on the trail.

It may be added, as an anti-climax, that when the surviving members of the Syndicate had been securely bagged, Moale turned to the inspector, with a broad smile of relief, and remarked, "I'll trouble you for that five-pound note."

I

ROW you feelin', son?"

Thirsty, dad."

The answer came without a particle of expression in a weary little voice.

"But doc says ye mustn't drink often, son," answered the man, gently. "I dastn't let ye drink yet. Now shet your eyes an' see if ye can't ketch a little nap.'

The man who was bending over the bed laid his hand gently on the sick child's forehead. The child did not move or reply. Its face was worn and shrunken to its little bones; its great blue eyes protruded in a way that made one feel that sleep never visited them, and that, nevertheless, they saw nothing.

"Well, Jim," had said a friend, cheeringly, who had come up to see how Landers's child was getting along, and whose attention was at once fixed by those eyes, "I guess 'tain't so bad. They ain't a tear 'ithin five feet of him." "No, nur a smile either," Landers had answered, hopelessly.

And now Landers sat down and gazed on the apathetic face, as he had been wont to do of late, with mournful

fascination.

"Yes, it's bad, bad," he murmured. "He's goin' the same way his pore ma did, the very same way.'"

To be sure, the doctor had not given up hope, which was kind of him, as he never expected to be paid for his services. Not that there was a more honest man in the town than Landers. But the mill had been closed now for two months on account of hard times, and there was no present prospect of its being reopened. Most of Landers's savings had gone to meet the expenses caused by his wife's illness. She, too, had had typhoid fever; she had died two weeks before, and had been buried with little ostentation. Landers was

an undemonstrative, earnest sort of a man, and, moreover, had the serious condition of his only child to think about. He was obliged, perhaps, to neglect the dead for the living.

For the last week he and the child had been subsisting on credit, which, Landers could not help feeling, was only another name for charity. The child had been failing under the régime of economy which Landers tried to introduce. And the doctor now said that it could pull through only if it had good nursing and the proper things to eat. The proper things to eat! Landers inquired what they were, and his heart sank as the delicacies were named over. Once more he went through that unproductive, harsh reasoning to which he had hardened himself. All the money came from the mill; now that the mill was closed people must soon begin to buy altogether on credit, but the stores could not go on indefinitely selling on credit. The end was near.

With this ruthless fact confronting him, he had gone out, day after day, in search of work, while, in the meantime, a neighbor, Mrs. Lennan, watched over the child. Each day his search had been equally vain; he knew beforehand that it would be. Men were standing idle on the corners and growing riotous through lack of food and work. Yet on this afternoon, when Mrs. Lennan came up to sit with the child, he went out as usual.

He made his ordinary unsuccessful round. As he was passing a group of idlers, who were sitting in front of the grocery, one of the men, who had a newspaper, called out to him.

"I'd like to git into somethin' like this, wouldn't you, Landers?" said the man. Landers took the newspaper and read, in a half-hearted way, how somebody somewhere with a little trouble, though without risk, had saved a railroad train from being wrecked, and had received on the spot a purse of over a hundred dollars.