He sank into it with a little sigh of content.  She threw herself on to the couch opposite to him.  Her hands drooped down a little wearily on either side, her head was thrown back.  Against the background of rose-silk cushions, her cheeks seemed unexpectedly pale.

“I am tired with travelling,” she murmured, “and I hate Chicago, and I have worried about you.  Day by day I have read the papers.  Everything has gone well?”

“So far as I know,” he answered.  “I did exactly as we planned—­or rather as you planned.  The papers have been full of the disappearance of Douglas Romilly.  You read how wonderfully it has all turned out?  Fate has provided him with a real reason for disappearing.  It seems that the business was bankrupt.”

“You mustn’t forget, though,” she reminded him, “that that also supplies a considerable motive for tracking him down.  He is supposed to have at least twenty thousand pounds with him.”

“I have all the papers,” he went on.  “They prove that he knew the state the business was in.  They prove that he really intended to disappear in New York.  The money stands to the credit of Merton Ware—­and another at a bank with which his firm apparently had had no connections, a small bank in Wall Street.”

“So that,” she remarked, “is where you get your pseudonym from?”

“It makes the identification so easy,” he pointed out, “and no one knew of it except he.  I could easily get a witness presently to prove that I am Merton Ware.”

“You haven’t drawn the money yet, then?”

“I haven’t been near the bank,” he replied.  “I still have over a thousand dollars—­money he had with him.  Sometimes I think that if I could I’d like to leave that twenty thousand pounds where it is.  I should like some day, if I could do so without suspicion, to let the creditors of the firm have it back again.  What do you think?”

She nodded.

“I would rather you didn’t touch it yourself,” she agreed.  “I think you’ll find, too, that you’ll be able to earn quite enough without wanting it.  Nothing disturbing has happened to you at all, then?”

“Once I had a fright,” he told her.  “I was in a restaurant close to my hotel.  I was there with a young woman who is typing the play for me.”

She looked towards him incredulously.

“You were there with a typewriter?” she exclaimed.

“I suppose it seems queer,” he admitted.  “It didn’t to me.  She is a plain, shabby, half starved little thing, fighting her own battle bravely.  She came to me for work—­she lives in the flat below—­and it seemed to me that she was just as hungry for a kind word as I was lonely, and I took her out with me.  Twice I have taken her.  Her name is Miss Grimes.”

“I am not in the least sure that I approve,” she said, “but go on.”

“A friend of hers came into the restaurant, a girl in the chorus of a musical comedy here, and she had with her a young man.  I recognised him at once.  We didn’t come across one another much, but he was on the steamer.”