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HAT could that cryptic conversation mean? For some little time after he had dismissed the operative and sent him back to Headquarters Odell sat lost in thought. It did not seem possible that even the sardonic little hunchback, embittered as he was with all the world, could have been referring to the series of crimes which had already carried off his own mother and brother, unless he were indeed insane, as the woman Gerda had hinted. But had she in her turn been referring to him when she gave to Odell himself that mysterious warning?

Obviously, if each suspected the other neither could be guilty; yet what could the "melodrama" be, and why should Rannie Chalmers's callous, sneering remark have shaken the woman momentarily from her well-studied pose? At whom could she have been looking with murder in her eyes when the hunchback came upon her, as he had said? If she were not concerned in the tragic mystery what was her purpose in this house?

Even as the questions thronged his brain, a casual remark of Taylor's recurred to him with startling significance. "I never saw so many books in my life … a lot of them are on medical subjects."

It was natural that a chronic invalid should be interested 194