He learned, after a time, that she was twenty-one years old, that she was the only daughter of a retired bank manager, that she had run away from the dull suburban circle of her family to try to find fortune on the wrong side of the footlights. He might have guessed that much, but he liked to know. It took some much more astute questioning to elicit a fact in which he was really much more interested.

". . . He's a junior clerk in the branch that used to be Daddy's. He came to the house once or twice, and we saw each other occasionally afterwards. It was all rather sweet and silly. We used to go to the pictures together, and once we met at a dance."

"Of course, you couldn't possibly have married him," said the Saint cunningly, and waited thoughtfully on her reply.

"It would have meant that I'd never have got away from all the mildewed things that I most wanted to run away from. I wanted to see Life. . . . But he really was a nice boy."

She had got a job in a revue chorus, and another girl in the same show had taken her to the Calumet one night. There she had met Mossiter, and others. She was without friends in London, and sheer loneliness made her crave for any society rather than none. There had been difficulties, she admitted. One man, a guest of Mossiter's-a German-had been particularly unpleasant. Yes, he was reputed to be very rich. . . .

"Don't you see," said the Saint, "that Mossiter could only have wanted to drug you for one of two reasons?"

"One of two?"

"When does this German go back to Germany?"

"I think he said he was going back tomorrow-that's Friday, isn't it?"

Simon shrugged.

"Such is Life," he murmured; and she frowned.

"I'm not a child, Mr. Templar."

"No girl ever is, in her own estimation," said the Saint rudely. "That's why my friends and I have been put to so much trouble and expense in the past-and are likely to go on being bothered in the same way."