For a moment she seemed about to refuse.  Then she flung herself into his easy-chair, took a cigarette, and, holding it between her lips, almost scarlet against the pallor of her cheeks, stretched upwards towards the match which he was holding.

“Stella and her boy were over to see me last night,” she announced, a little abruptly.

“The young lady with the ermines,” he murmured.

“And her boy, Felix Martin.  It was through him they came—­I could see that all right.  He was trying all the time to pump me about you.”

“About me?”

“Oh! you needn’t trouble to look surprised,” she remarked.  “I guess you remember the bee he had in his bonnet that night.”

“Mistook me for some one, didn’t he?” Philip murmured.

She nodded.

“Kind of queer you don’t read our newspapers!  It was a guy named Romilly—­Douglas Romilly—­who disappeared from the Waldorf Hotel.  Strange thing about it,” she went on, “is that I saw photographs of him in the newspapers, and I can’t recognise even a likeness.”

“This Mr. Felix Martin doesn’t agree with you, apparently,” Philip observed.

“He don’t go by the photographs,” Martha Grimes explained.  “He believes that he crossed from Liverpool with this Mr. Douglas Romilly, and that you,” she continued, crossing her legs and smoothing down her skirt to hide her shabby shoes, “are so much like him that he came down last night to see if there was anything else he could find out from me before he paid a visit to police headquarters.”

There was a moment’s silence.  Philip was apparently groping for a match, and the girl was keeping her head studiously turned away from him.

“What business is it of his?”

“There was a reward offered.  Don’t know as that would make much difference to Felix Martin, though.  According to Stella’s account, he is pretty well a millionaire already.”

“It would be more useful to you, wouldn’t it?” Philip remarked.

“Five hundred dollars!” Martha sighed.  “Don’t seem to me just now that there’s much in the world you couldn’t buy with five hundred dollars.”

“Well, what did you tell Mr. Felix Martin?”

“Oh, I lied, sure!  He’d found out the date you came into your rooms here—­the day this man Romilly disappeared—­but I told him that I’d known you and done work for you before then—­long enough before the Elletania ever reached New York.  That kind of stumped him.”

“Why did you do that?” Philip demanded.

“Dunno,” the girl replied, with a shrug of the shoulders.  “Just a fancy.  I guessed you wouldn’t want him poking around.”

“But supposing I had been Douglas Romilly, you might at least have divided the reward,” he reminded her.

“There’s money and money,” Martha declared.  “We spoke of that the other day.  Stella’s got money—­now.  Well, she’s welcome.  My time will come, I suppose, but if I can’t have clean money, I haven’t made up my mind yet whether I wouldn’t rather try the Hudson on a foggy morning.”