“You know.  The one we—­”

“Yes.  I saw it.”

“You didn’t, by any chance, take it home with you?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Certainly I’m sure.”

“You are an absent-minded beggar, you know,” he explained.  “You remember about the fire-tongs.  And a stick is like an umbrella.  One is likely to pick it up and—­”

“One is not likely to do anything of the sort.  At least, I didn’t.”

“Oh, all right.  Every one well?”

“Very well, thanks.”

“Suppose we’ll see you tonight?”

“Not unless you ring off and let me do some work,” I said irritably.

He rang off.  I was ruffled, I admit; but I was uneasy, also.  To tell the truth, the affair of the fire-tongs had cost me my self-confidence.  I called up my wife, and she said Herbert was a fool and Sperry also.  But she made an exhaustive search of the premises, without result.  Whoever had taken the stick, I was cleared.  Cleared, at least, for a time.  There were strange developments coming that threatened my peace of mind.

It was that day that I discovered that I was being watched.  Shadowed, I believe is the technical word.  I daresay I had been followed from my house, but I had not noticed.  When I went out to lunch a youngish man in a dark overcoat was waiting for the elevator, and I saw him again when I came out of my house.  We went downtown again on the same car.

Perhaps I would have thought nothing of it, had I not been summoned to the suburbs on a piece of business concerning a mortgage.  He was at the far end of the platform as I took the train to return to the city, with his back to me.  I lost him in the crowd at the downtown station, but he evidently had not lost me, for, stopping to buy a newspaper, I turned, and, as my pause had evidently been unexpected, he almost ran into me.

With that tendency of any man who finds himself under suspicion to search his past for some dereliction, possibly forgotten, I puzzled over the situation for some time that afternoon.  I did not connect it with the Wells case, for in that matter I was indisputably the hunter, not the hunted.

Although I found no explanation for the matter, I did not tell my wife that evening.  Women are strange and she would, I feared, immediately jump to the conclusion that there was something in my private life that I was keeping from her.

Almost all women, I have found, although not over-conscious themselves of the charm and attraction of their husbands, are of the conviction that these husbands exert a dangerous fascination over other women, and that this charm, which does not reveal itself in the home circle, is used abroad with occasionally disastrous effect.

My preoccupation, however, did not escape my wife, and she commented on it at dinner.

“You are generally dull, Horace,” she said, “but tonight you are deadly.”