“I—I beg your pardon, Mr. Carter,” the bewildered young man stammered. “I didn’t mean it, of course, but you are positively uncanny, and I could not understand how——” “It’s very simple, though,” Nick told him. “I’ve been robbed of some papers, unfortunately, and those dealing with your case are among them. Naturally, therefore, when you rushed in in that fashion, I concluded that the thief had tried to bleed you.” “Oh! So that was it?” Gillespie murmured somewhat sheepishly. Again his anger and sense of injury got the upper hand. “Then it’s you I have to thank for this, after all!” he cried. “I supposed my secret safe with you, as safe as if it were buried with me. Now, you calmly announce that it has been stolen from you. This is too much, Carter! Can’t you keep your papers where they will be safe? What right have you got to preserve such records, anyway? Why don’t you destroy them for the sake of your clients? It’s unbearable! This will be the ruin of me! If Florence finds out about it, she will refuse to marry me, and——” The detective held up his hand commandingly, and the young man—he did not appear to be over twenty-five—lapsed into silence. “I have already told you, Gillespie, that I profoundly regret what has happened. You are forgetting yourself, though, and wasting time. I already know who made away with those papers, and, with your assistance, I hope to lay a trap for him that will bring his schemes to an end very quickly. I think I can promise you that there will be no publicity, and that nothing need interfere with your approaching marriage. Now, tell me precisely what has happened.” Young Gillespie was several times a millionaire, having inherited a large fortune from his father a year or two before. The responsibility thus imposed upon him had sobered him down in a remarkable manner, and he was looked upon in certain quarters as one of the coming leaders in the financial world. Before his father’s death, however, he had sown a lot of wild oats of one sort or another, and it was in connection with one of these youthful escapades that Nick had been called in about four years previously. The affair threatened to be very serious, for the time, but the detective’s skill had been brought to bear in a surprising manner, with the result that everything had been smoothed out as well as possible without the vaguest rumor having got abroad. The young man fumbled in his pocket with a gloved hand, and produced a sheet of notepaper, the top of which had obviously been cut away. “That was found under the door when the house was opened up this morning,” he said. “Here’s the envelope. It was not stamped, of course.” Nick smoothed out the sheet of paper and looked at the sprawling, uncertain writing that covered it. He read: