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 who had full possession of the known facts. All the speculations were knocked in the head when Goles appeared with the stolen gems.

Naturally, it was possible that the salesman's conscience had troubled him, and he had returned the Wrest gems to his firm as a kind of atonement. But why had he returned the Wrest gems instead of the firm's own?

Speculation along these various and blind alley lanes more and more worked upon Urleigh's imagination. For years he had been hoping that some time he would stumble upon a ready-made plot for a story so that he could sell his string of newspapers and settle down to a comfortable living writing stories and living on his royalties. He, too, had his delusions.

He had a good deal to work on, and he was so good a newspaperman that he felt that if he could but pick up some certain clue or thread or fact—he could not guess what fact—he would be able to gather all the scattered vagaries of the case into a perfectly understandable story. It would be a good Sunday story, and he knew several newspapers which would pay him a hundred dollars for a broadside, perhaps a good deal more, for the Goles Diamond Case was now a standard mystery in Sunday edition archives.

In mid-November, one day when he had found but little news to send away, he was tired with writing