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Rh half hour in Rannie's room. The medical books he had found there were by no means confined in subject to spinal diseases. They had appeared rather to his unlearned eye to cover the whole field of materia medica; but one small volume in particular had given him food for thought. It was a treatise on diseases of the blood; and the chapter on septicemia had been faintly marked by the imprint of a thumb upon the margin, a small, delicate thumb, which had left a trace of aromatic grease upon the white surface of the page. The perfume had been distinctly noticeable when he opened the book. Was this another evidence of the strange carelessness which had characterized each phase of this astonishing series of crimes?

"Mr. Odell?" A quiet, self-contained voice at his side roused him from his thoughts; and the detective rose to find confronting him a tall, slender girl with wide-set, intelligent gray eyes, and masses of pale golden hair bound severely around her small head.

"Sergeant Odell, from Police Headquarters," he corrected her pleasantly but in a lowered tone, with a cautious glance about the deserted reception room. "We are investigating the murder of Mrs. Richard Lorne."

If he had hoped by the abruptness of the statement to shake the girl from her attitude of serene composure he was doomed to disappointment.

"Murder?" she repeated, regarding him thoughtfully. Do you mean it has been decided that she was murdered?"

You were in nightly attendance upon her, I understand, Miss Risby; and yet you do not seem surprised," Odell observed significantly.

"Because I am not. It would be too much to say that