“Then why is some one taking down what I say in the next room?”

He could only have guessed it, but he saw that he was right, by our faces.  He smiled bitterly.  “Go on,” he said.  “Take it down.  It can’t hurt anybody.  I don’t know who did it, and that’s God’s truth.”

And, after long wrangling, that was as far as we got.

He suspected who had done it, but he did not know.  He absolutely refused to surrender the letters in his possession, and a sense of delicacy, I think, kept us all from pressing the question of the A 31 matter.

“That’s a personal affair,” he said.  “I’ve had a good bit of trouble.  I’m thinking now of going back to England.”

And, as I say, we did not insist.

When he had gone, there seemed to be nothing to say.  He had left the same impression on all of us, I think—­of trouble, but not of crime.  Of a man fairly driven; of wretchedness that was almost despair.  He still had the letters.  He had, after all, as much right to them as we had, which was, actually, no right at all.  And, whatever it was, he still had his secret.

Herbert was almost childishly crestfallen.  Sperry’s attitude was more philosophical.

“A woman, of course,” he said.  “The A 31 letter shows it.  He tried to get her back, perhaps, by holding the letters over her head.  And it hasn’t worked out.  Poor devil!  Only—­who is the woman?”

It was that night, the fifteenth day after the crime, that the solution came.  Came as a matter of fact, to my door.

I was in the library, reading, or trying to read, a rather abstruse book on psychic phenomena.  My wife, I recall, had just asked me to change a banjo record for “The End of a Pleasant Day,” when the bell rang.

In our modest establishment the maids retire early, and it is my custom, on those rare occasions when the bell rings after nine o’clock, to answer the door myself.

To my surprise, it was Sperry, accompanied by two ladies, one of them heavily veiled.  It was not until I had ushered them into the reception room and lighted the gas that I saw who they were.  It was Elinor Wells, in deep mourning, and Clara, Mrs. Dane’s companion and secretary.

I am afraid I was rather excited, for I took Sperry’s hat from him, and placed it on the head of a marble bust which I had given my wife on our last anniversary, and Sperry says that I drew a smoking-stand up beside Elinor Wells with great care.  I do not know.  It has, however, passed into history in the Club, where every now and then for some time Herbert offered one of the ladies a cigar, with my compliments.

My wife, I believe, was advancing along the corridor when Sperry closed the door.  As she had only had time to see that a woman was in the room, she was naturally resentful, and retired to the upper floor, where I found her considerably upset, some time later.

While I am quite sure that I was not thinking clearly at the opening of the interview, I know that I was puzzled at the presence of Mrs. Dane’s secretary, but I doubtless accepted it as having some connection with Clara’s notes.  And Sperry, at the beginning, made no comment on her at all.