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 He had begun to descend the stairs into the entrance-hall, when he saw—with something of a shock—coming up, and therefore about to meet him, the lady whom he believed to be in the next suite to Ziegler’s, advising her partners through the communicating door. He had got it firmly into his head that during the twenty minutes he had been kept waiting that door had been opened, and the terms of the letter settled between the two principals; and here was Mrs. Talmage Eglinton not in her rooms at all, but apparently only just arrived.

“Ah, Mr. Forsyth!” she cried, coquettishly. “You have been up to my suite to look for me, with a view to standing me a luncheon somewhere. Now don’t deny that you were disappointed when you found that I had not reached the hotel and that the suite was locked up.”

Could he have been mistaken? Forsyth asked himself. If so, the mistake was not really his, but General Sadgrove’s, and the entire bottom was knocked out of the veteran’s theory as to this woman’s complicity.

“But I have not been up to your rooms,” was all he could reply on the spur of the mo-