for his arrest, but it will be valuable for identification. 'Blue eyes, light brown hair, fresh, clear complexion, well-modelled nose and chin.' Some of these things can be changed by tricks, but not all. For instance, there would be no use in smoking a man with black eyes and irregular features."

"'Smoking' him?"

"Oh, that's our way of putting it. Following him, it means."

"Suppose the French police don't succeed in catching him?"

"We will get him at Raleigh Mansions. He is sure to think that Lady Dyke's fate has never been determined, and he will return when the inquiry has blown over, to all appearance."

"You have quite made up your mind, then, that Sydney H. Corbett is the murderer?"

"It looks uncommonly like it. At any rate, he knows something about it. If not, why did he bolt to France two days after the crime? Why has he concealed his identity? Why does he take pains to receive his correspondence in the manner he has adopted? And, by Jove! suppose he isn't in Monte Carlo at all, but in London all the time!"

The inspector glowed with his sudden inspiration, but Bruce kept him to the lower level of realities.

"Corbett is, or was, in Monte Carlo. Of that you may be sure. He, and none other, got the letters sent to the Hotel du Cercle. I cannot for the life of me imagine why he did not take the last one. But let us look at what we know. Lady Dyke, we will say, went to Corbett's chambers, secretly and of her own accord. That may be taken as fairly established. Thence there is a blank in our intelligence until she appears as a hardly recognizable corpse, stuffed by hands beneath an old drain-pipe in the Thames at Putney. How do you fill up that gap, Mr. White?"

"Simply enough. Corbett, or some other person, persuaded her to voluntarily accompany him to Putney. She was killed there, and not in London. It would be almost a matter of impossibility for any man to have conveyed her lifeless body from Raleigh Mansions to Putney without attracting some notice. One man could not do it. Several might, but it is madness to imagine that a number of people would join together for the purpose of killing this poor lady."

"The seemingly impossible is often accomplished."

"Do you really believe, then, that she met her death in London?"

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