from one to the other of them. This was a new and rebellious Austin, a man chafing under a personal grievance, a belligerent butler.

“You mustn’t speak like that to Inspector McWalsh,” he commanded. “He is doing his duty.”

“That may be sir,” Austin remarked, “but how would you like to be called ‘Little Lancelot from Lunnon’?”

“You look it,” McWalsh said roughly. “Anyway I’ve no time to argue with house servants. What you’ve got to do is to look through our collection of pictures and see if you can identify any of ’em with the man you say you saw.”

Austin surveyed the faces with open aversion.

“He’s not here,” said Austin decisively. “He was not this criminal type at all. I tell you I mistook him for a member of Mr. Warren’s clubs, the kind of gentleman who dines at the house. These,” and he pointed derisively to the pillories of crime. “You wouldn’t be likely to see any of these at our house. They are just common.”

McWalsh sneered.

“I see. Look more like policemen I suppose?”

Austin smiled blandly.

“The very thing that was in my mind.”

CHAPTER II

ANTHONY TRENT TALKS ON CRIME

ANTHONY TRENTwas working his typewriter at top speed when there came a sudden, peremptory knocking at his door.

“Lord!” he grumbled, rising, “it must be old Lund to say I’m keeping him awake.”

He threw open his door to find a small, choleric and elderly man clad in a faded dressing gown. It was a man with a just grievance and a desire to express it.

“This is no time to hammer on your typewriter,” said Mr. Lund fiercely. “This is a boarding house and not a private residence. Do you realize that you generally begin work at midnight?”

“Come in,” said Anthony Trent genially. With friendly force he dragged the smaller man along and placed him in a morris chair. “Come in and give me your opinion of the kind of cigar smoked by the president of the publishing house for whose magazines I work noisily at midnight.”

Mr. Lund found himself a few seconds later sitting by an open window, an excellent cigar between his teeth, and the lights of New York spread before him. And he found his petulance vanishing. He wondered why it was that although he had before this come raging to Anthony Trent’s door, he always suffered himself to be talked out of his ill humors. It was something magnetic and engaging that surrounded this young writer of short stories.

“I can’t smoke a cigar when I’m working,” said Trent, lighting a pipe.

“Surely,” said Mr. Lund, not willing so soon to be robbed of his grievance, “you choose the wrong hours to work. Mrs. Clarke says you hardly ever touch your typewriter till late.”

“That’s because you don’t appreciate the kind of story I write,” Anthony Trent told him. “If I wrote the conventional story of love or matrimony I could work so many hours a day and begin at nine like any business man. But I don’t. I begin to write just when the world I write of begins to live. My men and women are waking into life now, just when the other folks are climbing into their suburban beds.”

“I understood you wrote detective stories,” Mr. Lund remarked. His grievances were vanishing. His opinion of the president of Trent’s magazine was a high one.

“Crook stories,” Anthony Trent confided. “Not the professional doings of thoughtless thugs. They don’t interest me a tinker’s curse. I like subtlety in crime. I could take you now into the great restaurants on Broadway or Fifth Avenue and point out to you some of the kings of crime—men who are clever enough to protect themselves from the police. Men who play the game as a good chess player does against a poorer one, with the certainty of being a move ahead.”

Mr. Lund conjured up a vision of such a restaurant peopled by such a festive crowd. He felt in that moment that an early manhood spent in Somerville had perhaps robbed him of a chance to live.

“They all get caught sooner or later,” asserted the little man in the morris chair.

“Because they get careless or because they trust another. If you want to be a successful crook, Mr. Lund, you’ll have to map out your plan of life as carefully as an athlete trains for a specific event. Now if you went in for crime you’d have to examine your weaknesses.”

“Thank you,” said Mr. Lund a little huffily, “I am not going in for a life of crime. I am perfectly content with my own line.” This, with unconscious sarcasm for Mr. Lund, pursued what he always told the borders was “the advertising.”

“There are degrees in crime I admit,” said Anthony Trent, “but I am perfectly serious in what I say. The ordinary crook has a low mental capacity. He generally gets caught in the end as all such clumsy asses should. The really big man in crime often gets caught because he is not aware of his weaknesses. Drink often brings out an incautious boasting side of a man. If you are going in for crime, Mr. Lund, cut out drink I beg of you.”

“I do not need your advice,” Mr. Lund returned with some dignity. “I have tasted rum once only in my life.”

Trent looked at him interested.

“It would probably make you want to fight,” he said.

“I don’t care to think of it,” said Mr. Lund.

“And the curious part of it is,” mused Trent, “that in the sort of crowd these high class crooks mix with it is most unusual not to drink, and the man who doesn’t is almost always under suspicion. The great thing is to be able to take your share and stop before the danger mark is reached. Did you ever hear of Captain Despard?”

“I think not,” Lund answered.

“A boyhood idol of mine,” Anthony Trent admitted. “One of the few gentleman crooks. Most of the so-called gentlemen criminals have been anything but gentlemen born. Despard was. I was in Devonshire on my last trip to the other side and I made a pilgrimage to the place where he was born. Funny to think that a man brought up in one of the ‘stately homes of England, how beautiful they stand,’ should come to what he was.”

“Woman, I suppose,” said Lund, as one man of the world to another.

“Not in the beginning,” Anthony Trent answered. “He was a cavalry officer in India—Kipling type you know—and had a craze for precious stones. Began to collect them honestly enough and found his pay and private fortune insufficient. He got kicked out of his regiment anyway and went to Cape Town. One night a very large diamond was stolen from a bedroom of the Mount Nelson hotel and he was suspected. They couldn’t prove anything, but he came over here to New York and sold it, under another name, and with a different history, to one of the Pierpoints. The trouble with Captain Despard was that he used to drink heavily when he had pulled a big thing off. While he was planning a coup he was temperate and he never touched a drop while he was working.”

“Started to boast, I suppose?” Lund suggested.

“No,” said Anthony Trent. “Not that sort at all. He lived at a pretty fair sort of club here in the forties and was well enough liked until the drink was in him. It was then that he began to think of his former mode of life and the kind he was now living. He used to think the other members were trying to slight him or avoid him. He laboriously picked quarrels with some of them. He beat up one of them in a fist fight in the club billiard room. This fellow brooded over his licking for a long time and then with another man, also inflamed with cocktails, went up to Despard’s room to beat him up. Despard was out, so they broke his furniture. They found that the legs of chairs and tables had been hollowed so as to conceal what Despard