he failed only rarely did any one else succeed.  If ever criminal investigation was a man’s calling, it was Haggerty’s.  He had infinite patience, the heart of a lion and the strength of a gorilla.  Had he been highly educated, as a detective he would have been a fizzle; his mind would have been concerned with variant lofty thoughts, and the sordid would have repelled him:  and all crimes are painted on a background of sordidness.  In one thing Haggerty stood among his peers and topped many of them; in his long record there was not one instance of his arresting an innocent man.

So Haggerty had his failures; there are geniuses on both sides of the law; and the pariah-dog is always just a bit quicker mentally than the thoroughbred hound who hunts him; indeed, to save his hide he has to be.

Nearly every great fact is like a well-balanced kite; it has for its tail a whimsy.  Haggerty, on a certain day, received twenty-five hundred dollars from the Hindu prince and five hundred more from the hotel management.  The detective bore up under the strain with stoic complacency.  “The Blind Madonna of the Pagan—­Chance” always had her hand upon his shoulder.

Kitty went to Bar Harbor, her mother to visit friends in Orange.  Thomas walked with a straight spine always; but it stiffened to think that, without knowing a solitary item about his past, they trusted him with the run of the house.  The first day there was work to do; the second day, a little less; the third, nothing at all.  So he moped about the great house, lonesome as a forgotten dog.  He wrote a sonnet on being lonesome, tore it up and flung the scraps into the waste-basket.  Once, he seated himself at the piano and picked out with clumsy forefinger Walking Down the Old Kent Road.  Kitty could play.  Often in the mornings, while at his desk, he had heard her; and oddly enough, he seemed to sense her moods by what she played. (That’s the poet.) When she played Chopin or Chaminade she went about gaily all the day; when she played Beethoven, Grieg or Bach, Thomas felt the presence of shadows.

There was a magnificent library, mostly editions de luxe.  Thomas smiled over the many uncut volumes.  True, Dickens, Dumas and Stevenson were tolerably well-thumbed; but the host of thinkers and poets and dramatists and theologians, in their hand-tooled Levant . . . !  Away in an obscure corner (because of its cheap binding) he came across a set of Lamb.  He took out a volume at random and glanced at the fly-leaf—­“Kitty Killigrew, Smith College.”  Then he went into the body of the book.  It was copiously marked and annotated.  There was something so intimate in the touch of the book that he felt he was committing a sacrilege, looking as it were into Kitty’s soul.  Most men would have gone through the set.  Thomas put the book away.  Thou fool, indeed!  What a hash he had made of his affairs!

He saw Killigrew at breakfast only.  The merchant preferred his club in the absence of his family.