careful search must be made.”

“But,” spoke up Norah, “perhaps Mr. Gately went home. There is no positive assurance that he did not.”

Mr. Talcott looked at Norah keenly. He didn’t seem to regard her as an impertinent young person, but he took her suggestion seriously.

“That may be,” he agreed. “I think I will call up his residence.”

He did so, and I gathered from the remarks he made on the telephone that Amos Gately was not at his home, nor was his niece, Miss Olive Raynor, there.

Talcott made another call or two, and I finally learned that he had located Miss Raynor.

For, “Very well,” he said; “I shall hope to see you here in ten or fifteen minutes, then.”

He hung up the receiver,—he had used the instrument in Jenny’s room, and not the upset one on Mr. Gately’s desk,—and he vouchsafed:

“I think it is all right. Miss Raynor says she saw her uncle here this afternoon, shortly after luncheon, and he said he was about to leave the office for the day. She thinks he is at his club or on the way home. However, she is coming around here, as she is in the limousine, and fearing a storm, she wants to take Mr. Gately home.”

CHAPTER III The Elevator

CHAPTER III

Mr. Talcott returned to the middle room and looked more carefully at the disturbed condition of things around and on Mr. Gately’s desk.

“It is certain that Mr. Gately left the room in haste,” he said, “for here is what is undoubtedly a private and personal checkbook left open. I shall take on myself the responsibility of putting it away, for the moment, at least.”

Mr. Talcott closed the checkbook and put it in a small drawer of the desk.

“Why don’t you put away that hatpin, too?” suggested Norah, eying the pin curiously. “I don’t think it belongs to Miss Raynor.”

“Take it up by the edge,” I warned; “I may be jumping to conclusions, but there is a possibility that a crime has been committed, and we must preserve what may be evidence.”

“Quite right, Mr. Brice,” agreed Talcott, and he gingerly picked up the pin by taking the edges of its ornate head between his thumb and forefinger. The head was an Egyptian 

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