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“There must be something you can do to get it on this fellow, though,” persisted Craig.

“Well,” considered the house man, “we have what might be called our hotel secret service–several men and women operating entirely apart from the hotel force of detectives who, like myself, are too well known to clever crooks. Nobody knows them, except myself. There’s one–that girl over there dancing with that middle-aged man who has mail sent here but doesn’t live here. Could they be of use?”

“Just the thing,” exclaimed Craig enthusiastically. “Can’t you have her get acquainted–just as a precaution–with that man? His name, by the way, I understand is Sherburne.”

“I’ll do it,” agreed Dunn, rising unostentatiously.

Just then I happened to glance across the floor and over the heads of those seated at the tables at a door opposite us. It was my turn hastily to seize Kennedy’s elbow.

“Good God!” I exclaimed involuntarily.

There, in the further doorway of the tea room, stood Judson Seabury himself!

Without a word, Craig rose and quickly crossed the dancing floor, stopping before Mrs. Seabury’s table. Instead of waiting to be introduced, he sat down deliberately, as though he had been there all the time and had just gone out of the room and come back. He did it all so quickly that he was able in a perfectly natural way to turn and see that Seabury himself had been watching and now was advancing slowly, picking his way among the crowded tables.

From around my corner I saw Craig whisper a word or two to Mrs. Seabury, then rise and meet Seabury less than halfway from the door by which he had been standing.

The tension of the situation was too much for Mrs. Seabury. Confounded and bewildered, she fled precipitately, passing within a few feet of my table. Her face was positively ghastly.

As for Sherburne, he merely sat a moment and surveyed the irate husband with calm and studied insolence at a safe distance. Then he, too, rose and turned deliberately on his heel.

Curious to know how Craig would meet the dilemma, I watched eagerly and was surprised to see Seabury, after a moment’s whispered talk, turn and leave the tea room by the same door through which he had entered.

“What did you do?” I asked, as Craig rejoined me a few moments later. “What did you say? My hat’s off to you,” I added in admiration.

“Told him I had trailed her here with one of my operatives, but was convinced there was nothing wrong, after all,” he returned.

“You mean,” I asked as the result of Craig’s quick thinking dawned on me, “that you told him Sherburne was your operative?”

Kennedy nodded. “I want to see him, now, if I can,” he said simply.