We were only just in time for our train back to Baltimore, but McKnight took advantage of a second’s delay to shake the station agent warmly by the hand.

“I want to express my admiration for you,” he said beamingly.  “Ability of your order is thrown away here.  You should have been a city policeman, my friend.”

The agent looked a trifle uncertain.

“The young lady was the one who told me to keep still,” he said.

McKnight glanced at me, gave the agent’s hand a final shake, and climbed on board.  But I knew perfectly that he had guessed the reason for my delay.

He was very silent on the way home.  Hotchkiss, too, had little to say.  He was reading over his notes intently, stopping now and then to make a penciled addition.  Just before we left the train Richey turned to me.  “I suppose it was the key to the door that she tied to the gate?”

“Probably.  I did not ask her.”

“Curious, her locking that fellow in,” he reflected.  “You may depend on it, there was a good reason for it all.  And I wish you wouldn’t be so suspicious of motives, Rich,” I said warmly.

“Only yesterday you were the suspicious one,” he retorted, and we lapsed into strained silence.

It was late when we got to Washington.  One of Mrs. Klopton’s small tyrannies was exacting punctuality at meals, and, like several other things, I respected it.  There are always some concessions that should be made in return for faithful service.

So, as my dinner hour of seven was long past, McKnight and I went to a little restaurant down town where they have a very decent way of fixing chicken a la King.  Hotchkiss had departed, economically bent, for a small hotel where he lived on the American plan.

“I want to think some things over,” he said in response to my invitation to dinner, “and, anyhow, there’s no use dining out when I pay the same, dinner or no dinner, where I am stopping.”

The day had been hot, and the first floor dining-room was sultry in spite of the palms and fans which attempted to simulate the verdure and breezes of the country.

It was crowded, too, with a typical summer night crowd, and, after sitting for a few minutes in a sweltering corner, we got up and went to the smaller dining-room up-stairs.  Here it was not so warm, and we settled ourselves comfortably by a window.

Over in a corner half a dozen boys on their way back to school were ragging a perspiring waiter, a proceeding so exactly to McKnight’s taste that he insisted on going over to join them.  But their table was full, and somehow that kind of fun had lost its point for me.

Not far from us a very stout, middle-aged man, apoplectic with the heat, was elephantinely jolly for the benefit of a bored-looking girl across the table from him, and at the next table a newspaper woman ate alone, the last edition propped against the water-bottle before her, her hat, for coolness, on the corner of the table.  It was a motley Bohemian crowd.