Somehow I feel wonderfully cheered by his call.  For the first time since seven last evening I begin to breathe freely again.

And so, lady who likes mystery, the matter stands on the afternoon of the last day of July, nineteen hundred and fourteen.

I shall mail you this letter to-night.  It is my third to you, and it carries with it three times the dreams that went with the first; for they are dreams that live not only at night, when the moon is on the courtyard, but also in the bright light of day.

Yes—­I am remarkably cheered.  I realize that I have not eaten at all—­save a cup of coffee from the trembling hand of Walters —­since last night, at Simpson’s.  I am going now to dine.  I shall begin with grapefruit.  I realize that I am suddenly very fond of grapefruit.

How bromidic to note it—­we have many tastes in common!

Ex-strawberry man.

The third letter from her correspondent of the Agony Column increased in the mind of the lovely young woman at the Carlton the excitement and tension the second had created.  For a long time, on the Saturday morning of its receipt, she sat in her room puzzling over the mystery of the house in Adelphi Terrace.  When first she had heard that Captain Fraser-Freer, of the Indian Army, was dead of a knife wound over the heart, the news had shocked her like that of the loss of some old and dear friend.  She had desired passionately the apprehension of his murderer, and had turned over and over in her mind the possibilities of white asters, a scarab pin and a Homburg hat.

Perhaps the girl longed for the arrest of the guilty man thus keenly because this jaunty young friend of hers—­a friend whose name she did not know—­to whom, indeed, she had never spoken—­was so dangerously entangled in the affair.  For from what she knew of Geoffrey West, from her casual glance in the restaurant and, far more, from his letters, she liked him extremely.

And now came his third letter, in which he related the connection of that hat, that pin and those asters with the column in the Mail which had first brought them together.  As it happened, she, too, had copies of the paper for the first four days of the week.  She went to her sitting-room, unearthed these copies, and—­gasped!  For from the column in Monday’s paper stared up at her the cryptic words to Rangoon concerning asters in a garden at Canterbury.  In the other three issues as well, she found the identical messages her strawberry man had quoted.  She sat for a moment in deep thought; sat, in fact, until at her door came the enraged knocking of a hungry parent who had been waiting a full hour in the lobby below for her to join him at breakfast.

“Come, come!” boomed her father, entering at her invitation.  “Don’t sit here all day mooning.  I’m hungry if you’re not.”

With quick apologies she made ready to accompany him down-stairs.  Firmly, as she planned their campaign for the day, she resolved to put from her mind all thought of Adelphi Terrace.  How well she succeeded may be judged from a speech made by her father that night just before dinner: