“Harry King, and stewed to the gills again!” murmured Pete Daley.  “Wow! he has some bun on!”

“Wheresh my paper cutter, Darcy?” went on King, smiling in a fashion meant to be merry, but which was fixed and glassy as to his eyes.  “Wheresh my li’l preshent for wifely?  Got her name all ’graved on it nice an’ pretty?  Thash what’ll square wifely when I been out—­hic—­al’night.  Wheresh my paper cutter, Darcy, ol’ man?”

Silently the jewelry worker pointed to the stained dagger—­it was really that, though designed for a paper cutter.  The detective held it out, and the red spots on it seemed to show brighter in the gleam of the electric lights.

“Is that your knife, Harry King?” demanded Thong.

“Sure thash mine!  Bought it in li’l ole N’ York lash week.  Didn’t have no name on it—­brought it here for my ole fren’, Darcy, t’ engrave.  Put wifely’s name on—­her namesh Pearl—­P-e-a-r-l!” and he spelled it out laboriously and thickly.

“My wife—­she likes them things.  Me—­I got no use for ’em.  Gimme oyster fork—­or clam, for that matter—­an’ a bread n’ butter knife—­’n I’m all right.  But gotta square wife somehow.  Take her home nice preshent.  Thatsh me—­sure thash mine!” and carefully trying to balance himself, he reached forward as though to take the stained dagger from the hand of the detective.

“You got Pearl’s name ’graved on it, Darcy, ole man?” asked King, thickly, licking his hot and feverish lips.

“No,” answered the jewelry worker, hollowly.

Then Harry King, seemingly for the first time, became aware that all was not well in the place he had entered.  He turned and saw the body of the murdered woman as the men from the morgue Started out with it.  He started back as though some one had struck him a blow.

“Is she—­is she dead?” he gasped.  “Dead—­Mrs. Darcy?”

“Looks that way,” said Carroll in cool tones.  “You’d better come in here and sit down a while, Harry,” he went on, and he led the unsteady young man to the rear room, while the men from the morgue carried out the lifeless body.

CHAPTER III

THE FISHERMAN

From a little green book, which, from the evidence of its worn covers, seemed to have been much read, the tall, military-appearing occupant of a middle seat in the parlor car of the express to Colchester scanned again this passage: 

“And if you rove for perch with a minnow, then it is best to be alive, you sticking your hook through his back fin, or a minnow with the hook in his upper lip, and letting him swim up and down about mid-water, or a little lower, and you still keeping him about that depth with a cork, which ought to be a very little one; and the way you are to fish for perch with a small frog—­”

“Ah-a-a-a!”

It was a long-drawn exclamation of anticipatory delight, and into the eyes of the military-looking traveler there appeared a soft and gentle light, as though, in fancy, he could look off across sunlit meadows to a stream sparkling beneath a blue sky, white-studded with fleecy clouds, where there was a soft carpet of green grass, shaded by a noble oak under which he might lounge and listen to the wind rustling the newly-born leaves.