Considerably mystified, I followed him to the sidewalk.

“You’re entitled to an explanation,” he laughed catching my bewildered look as he opened the cab door.  “I didn’t want to go up now while she is there, but I wanted to get on good terms with that boy.  We’ll wait until she comes down, then go up.”

“Where?” I asked.

“That’s what I am going through all this elaborate preparation to find out.  I have no more idea than you have.”

It could not have been more than twenty minutes later when Mrs. Moulton emerged rather hurriedly, and drove away.

While we had been waiting I had observed a man on the other side of the street who seemed unduly interested in the Recherche, too, for he had walked up and down the block no less than six times.  Kennedy saw him, and as he made no effort to follow Mrs. Moulton, Kennedy did not do so either.  In fact a little quick glance which she had given at our cab had raised a fear that she might have discovered that she was being followed.

Kennedy and I paid off our cabman and sauntered into the Recherche in the most debonair manner we could assume.

“Now, son, we’ll go up,” he said to the boy who, remembering us, and now not at all clear in his mind that he might not have seen us before that, whisked us to the tenth floor.

“Let me see,” said Kennedy, “it’s number one hundred and—­er—–­”

“Three,” prompted the boy.

He pressed the buzzer and a neatly dressed colored maid responded.

“I had an appointment here with Mrs. Moulton this morning,” remarked Kennedy.

“She has just gone,” replied the maid, off her guard.

“And was to meet Mr. Schloss here in half an hour,” he added quickly.

It was the maid’s turn to look surprised.

“I didn’t think he was to be here,” she said.  “He’s had some—­”

“Trouble at the office,” supplied Kennedy.  “That’s what it was about.  Perhaps he hasn’t been able to get away yet.  But I had the appointment.  Ah, I see a telephone in the hall.  May I?”

He had stepped politely in, and by dint of cleverly keeping his finger on the hook in the half light, he carried on a one-sided conversation with himself long enough to get a good chance to look about.

There was an air of quiet and refinement about the apartment in the Recherche.  It was darkened to give the little glowing electric bulbs in their silken shades a full chance to simulate right.  The deep velvety carpets were noiseless to the foot, and the draperies, the pictures, the bronzes, all bespoke taste.

But the chief objects of interest to Craig were the little square green baize-covered tables on one of which lay neatly stacked a pile of gilt-edged cards and a mahogany box full of ivory chips of red, white and blue.

It was none of the old-time gambling places, like Danfield’s, with its steel door which Craig had once cut through with an oxyacetylene blowpipe in order to rescue a young spendthrift from himself.