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124 I hate Chicago, and I have worried about you. Day by day I have read the papers. Everything has gone well?"

"So far as I know," he answered. "I did exactly as we planned—or rather as you planned. The papers have been full of the disappearance of Douglas Romilly. You read how wonderfully it has all turned out? Fate has provided him with a real reason for disappearing. It seems that the business was bankrupt."

"You mustn't forget, though," she reminded him, "that that also supplies a considerable motive for tracking him down. He is supposed to have at least twenty thousand pounds with him."

"I have all the papers," he went on. "They prove that he knew the state the business was in. They prove that he really intended to disappear in New York. The money stands to the credit of Merton Ware—and another at a bank with which his firm apparently had had no connections, a small bank in Wall Street."

"So that," she remarked, "is where you get your pseudonym from?"

"It makes the identification so easy," he pointed out, "and no one knew of it except he. I could easily get a witness presently to prove that I am Merton Ware."

"You haven't drawn the money yet, then?"

"I haven't been near the bank," he replied. "I still have over a thousand dollars—money he had with him. Sometimes I think that if I could I'd like to leave that twenty thousand pounds where it is. I should like some day, if I could do so without