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He finished and sat back in his chair, eyeing her face. Her expression gave him no clew to any conclusions she might have reached.

“I’ll do my best,” she said simply, “but I must have full authority to do it in my own way.”

“Agreed. I’m not asking anything else from you.”

In a study she rose and went to the mantelpiece and took one book from the heap of books there. She opened it and glanced abstractedly through the leaves as they flittered under her fingers.

With her eyes on the page headings she said to him: “I quarrel with one of your premises.”

“Which one?”

“The one that the woman we want will have the paper hidden in her hair or in her corsage or possibly in her stocking.”

“Well, I couldn’t think of any other likely place in which she might hide it. She wouldn’t have it in a pocket, would she? Women don’t have pockets in their party frocks, do they?”

Disregarding his questions she asked one herself:

“You say it is a small strip of paper, and that probably it is rolled up into a wad about the size of a hazelnut?”

“It was rolled up so when Westerfeltner parted from it–that’s all I can tell you. Why do you ask that?”

“Oh, it doesn’t particularly matter. I merely was thinking of various possibilities and contingencies.”

Apparently she now had found the place in the book which, more or less mechanically, she had been seeking. She turned down the upper corner of a certain page for a marker and closed the book.

“Well, in any event,” she said, “I must get to work. I think I shall begin by calling up my cousin to tell her, among other things, that her party may have some rather unique features that she had not included in her program. And where can I reach you by telephone or by messenger–say, in an hour from now?”

A number of small things, seemingly in no wise related to the main issue, occurred that evening and on the following morning. In the evening, for example, Mrs. Hadley-Smith revised the schedule of amusements she had planned for her All Fools’ party, incorporating some entirely new notions into the original scheme. In the morning Miss Mildred Smith visited the handkerchief counter of a leading department store, where she made selections and purchases from the stocks, going thence to a shop dealing in harness and leather goods. Here she gave a special commission for immediate execution.

Toward dusk of the evening of April first a smallish unobtrusive-looking citizen procured admittance to Mrs. Hadley-Smith’s home, on East Sixty-third Street just off Fifth Avenue. With the air of a man having business on the premises he walked through the front door along with a group of helpers from the caterer’s. Once inside, he sent a name by the butler to Mrs. Hadley-Smith, who apparently awaited such word, for promptly she came downstairs and personally escorted the man to a small study at the back of the first floor; wherein, having been left alone, he first locked the door leading to the hall and drew the curtains of the windows giving upon a rear courtyard, and proceeded to make himself quite at home.

He ate a cold supper which he found spread upon a table and after that he used the telephone rather extensively. This done, he lit a cigar and stretched himself upon a sofa, smoking away with the air of a man who has finished his share of a given undertaking and may take his ease until the time arrives for renewed action upon his part. Along toward nine-thirty o’clock, when he had smoked his third cigar, there came a soft knock thrice repeated upon the door, whereupon he rose and unlocked the door, but without opening it to see who might be outside he went back to his couch, lay down and lit a fourth cigar. For the next little while we may leave him there to his comfortable solitude and his smoke haze.