"The next time you try a trick like that," Todd advised him, on the train that night, "be careful what you leave behind in your room. The two torn letterheads of the Canadian Pacific nearly misled me, but the other one referring to the Honduran line, plus the book on Honduras and the fact that your landlady stated that you hated cold weather, gave you dead away. Of course, even without that, it was a toss-up between Canada and Central America. Those are the only two places where an embezzler is comparatively safe these days. I hope, for the sake of your comfort, they give you plenty of blankets in Joliet." * * * * * Quinn paused a moment to repack his pipe, and then, "So far as I know, he's still handling the prison finances," he added. "Yes--they found at the trial that he had had a clean record up to the moment he slipped, but the criminal tendencies were there and he wasn't able to resist temptation. He had speculated with the bank funds, covered his shortages by removing the pages from the ledger and kiting checks through the State National, and then determined to risk everything in one grand clean-up. "He might have gotten away with it, too, if Todd hadn't spotted the peculiarities which indicated moral weakness. However, you can't always tell. No one who knew Mrs. Armitage would have dreamed that she was--what she was." "Well," I inquired, "what was she?" "That's what puzzled Washington and the State Department for several months," replied Quinn. "It's too long a story to spin to-night. That's her picture up there, if you care to study her features." And I went home wondering what were the crimes of which such a beautiful woman could have been guilty. XXIII THE CASE OF MRS. ARMITAGE To look at him no one would have thought that Bill Quinn had a trace of sentiment in his make-up. Apparently he was just the grizzled old veteran of a hundred battles with crime, the last of which--a raid on a counterfeiter's den in Long Island--had laid him up with a game leg and a soft berth in the Treasury Department, where, for years he had been an integral part of the United States Secret Service. But in the place of honor in Quinn's library-den there hung the photograph of a stunningly handsome woman, her sable coat thrown back just enough to afford a glimpse of a throat of which Juno might have been proud, while in her eyes there sparkled a light which seemed to hint at much but reveal little. It was very evident that she belonged to a world entirely apart from that of Quinn, yet the very fact that her photograph adorned the walls of his den proved that she had been implicated in some case which had necessitated Secret Service investigation--for the den was the shrine of relics relating to cases in which Quinn's friends had figured. Finally, one evening I gathered courage to inquire about her.