If there was a plot, could Nina be in it? And if she was in it, what was her part? And if Hilton was in it, what was that gentleman’s rôle? Nina and Loveman went off together toward three o’clock. Clifford, alive with suspicion, followed in a taxi--only to see Nina set down at her hotel, and see Loveman drive straight to his apartment house and enter. Clifford watched the windows of the lawyer’s studio apartment, wondering if any person had been waiting within to consult with Loveman; but promptly at four o’clock--Loveman’s regular hour for going to bed--the studio windows darkened. Clifford had learned nothing that was definite. But he had the sense, the result of long experience, that he was on the trail of the parties chiefly concerned, and that he was close upon something big--though that something was provokingly intangible and elusive. There was but one way to handle so obscure a situation: that was by an intensive study of every possibility, and the next day Clifford began upon this slow, cautious programme. Loveman’s telephone wires had already been tapped by the Police Department. Clifford now took the vacant apartment above Loveman’s and secretly installed a dictagraph in the big studio which served Loveman as a library. Always there were ears at these wires; and with the help of four of Commissioner Thorne’s best plain-clothes men, Clifford tried to keep every movement of the suspects covered. Also he enlisted the aid of Uncle George, in whose ears the secret doings of Broadway were somehow mysteriously published. Loveman came and went about his business and pleasures, apparently as usual; Hilton was not seen again; Nina Cordova was seen only two other times; and once, for a few minutes in the Claridge restaurant, Clifford saw another woman with Loveman--one Nan Burdette, who had had a meteoric career in New York’s pleasure life, and about whom Clifford had heard a thing or two not at all to that young woman’s credit. And though she never knew it, Clifford personally kept a watch over Mary Regan. Some way, he felt sure, Mary was involved in this. Also as part of this plan of studying all possibly related circumstances, Clifford scrutinized every available item of the pasts of Hilton and Nan Burdette and Nina Cordova. But for all his own effort and the efforts of those helping him, Clifford still had little more than suspicion to explain the disappearance of Jack Morton. Jack could not have vanished more clearly had gravitation become suddenly invalidated and had he been shot off into space in the night.