‘Good-night.  When do you sail?’

’On Saturday.  I sing “Juliet” on Friday night and sail the next morning.’

‘On the Leofric?’

‘Yes.’

‘So do I. We shall cross together.’

‘How delightful!  I’m so glad!  Good-night again.’

Alphonsine was standing at the open door of the dressing-room in the bright light, and Margaret nodded and went in.  The maid looked after the elderly man till he finally disappeared, and then she went in too and locked the door after her.

Griggs walked home in the bitter March weather.  When he was in New York, he lived in rooms on the second floor of an old business building not far from Fifth Avenue.  He was quite alone in the house at night, and had to walk up the stairs by the help of a little electric pocket-lantern he carried.  He let himself into his own door, turned up the light, slipped off his overcoat and gloves, and went to the writing-table to get his pipe.  That is very often the first thing a man does when he gets home at night.

The old briar pipe he preferred to any other lay on the blotting-paper in the circle where the light was brightest.  As he took it a stain on his right hand caught his eye, and he dropped the pipe to look at it.  The blood was dark and was quite dry, and he could not find any scratch to account for it.  It was on the inner side of his right hand, between the thumb and forefinger, and was no larger than an ordinary watch.

‘How very odd!’ exclaimed Mr. Griggs aloud; and he turned his hand this way and that under the electric lamp, looking for some small wound which he supposed must have bled.  There was a little more inside his fingers, and between them, as if it had oozed through and then had spread over his knuckles.

But he could find nothing to account for it.  He was an elderly man who had lived all over the world and had seen most things, and he was not easily surprised, but he was puzzled now.  Not the least strange thing was that the stain should be as small as it was and yet so dark.  He crossed the room again and examined the front of his overcoat with the most minute attention.  It was made of a dark frieze, almost black, on which a red stain would have shown very little; but after a very careful search Griggs was convinced that the blood which had stained his hand had not touched the cloth.

He went into his dressing-room and looked at his face in his shaving-glass, but there was certainly no stain on the weather-beaten cheeks or the furrowed forehead.

‘How very odd!’ he exclaimed a second time.

He washed his hands slowly and carefully, examining them again and again, for he thought it barely possible that the skin might have been cracked somewhere by the cutting March wind, and might have bled a little, but he could not find the least sign of such a thing.

When he was finally convinced that he could not account for the stain he had now washed off, he filled his old pipe thoughtfully and sat down in a big shabby arm-chair beside the table to think over other questions more easy of solution.  For he was a philosophical man, and when he could not understand a matter he was able to put it away in a safe place, to be kept until he got more information about it.