“At Hazlehurst,” she replied, gratefully.  “Oh, Mr. Kennedy, how can I ever thank you?”

She seemed overcome with gratitude and took his hand, pressed it, even kissed it.

“Just a minute,” he added, carefully extricating his hand.  “I’ll be ready in just a minute.”

Kennedy entered the room where I was listening.

“What’s it all about, Craig?” I whispered, mystified.

For a moment he stood thinking, apparently reconsidering what he had just done.  Then his second thought seemed to approve it.

“This is a trap of the Clutching Hand, Walter,” he whispered, adding tensely, “and we’re going to walk right into it.”

I looked at him in amazement.

“But, Craig,” I demurred, “that’s foolhardy.  Have her trailed—­ anything—­but—–­”

He shook his head and with a mere motion of his hand brushed aside my objections as he went to a cabinet across the room.

From one shelf he took out a small metal box and from another a test tube, placing the test tube in his waistcoat pocket, and the small box in his coatpocket, with excessive care.

Then he turned and motioned to me to follow him out into the other room.  I did so, stuffing my “gatt” into my pocket.

“Let me introduce my friend, Mr. Jameson,” said Craig, presenting me to the pretty crook.

The introduction quickly over, we three went out to get Craig’s car which he kept at a nearby garage.

. . . . . . . .

That forenoon, Perry Bennett was reading up a case.  In the outer office Milton Schofield, his office boy, was industriously chewing gum and admiring his feet cocked up on the desk before him.

The door to the waiting room opened and an attractive woman of perhaps thirty, dressed in extreme mourning, entered with a boy.

Milton cast a glance of scorn at the “little dude.”  He was in reality about fourteen years old but was dressed to look much younger.

Milton took his feet down in deference to the lady, but snickered openly at the boy.  A fight seemed imminent.

“Did you wish to see Mr. Bennett?” asked the precocious Milton politely on one hand while on the other he made a wry grimace.

“Yes—­here is my card,” replied the woman.

It was deeply bordered in black.  Even Milton was startled at reading it:  “Mrs. Taylor Dodge.”

He looked at the woman in open-mouthed astonishment.  Even he knew that Elaine’s mother had been dead for years.

The woman, however, true to her name in the artistic coterie in which she was leader, had sunk into a chair and was sobbing convulsively, as only “Weepy Mary” could.

It was so effective that even Milton was visibly moved.  He took the card in, excitedly, to Bennett.

“There’s a woman outside—­says she is Mrs. Dodge!” he cried.

If Milton had had an X-ray eye he could have seen her take a cigarette from her handbag and light it nonchalantly the moment he was gone.