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The younger man looked up with frightened brown eyes.

“What are you getting at, Rush? You don’t think — Yes, as you say, I was surprised. What are you getting at?”

“The marriage license,” the detective said, ignoring his client’s repeated question, “was issued to Landow four days before the wedding-day, four days before Jerome Falsoner’s body was found.”

Millar chewed a fingernail and shook his head hopelessly.

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” he mumbled around the finger. “The whole thing is bewildering.”

“Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Millar,” the detective’s voice filled the office with hoarse insistence, “that you were on more friendly terms with Sara Falsoner than with anyone else in the trust company?”

The younger man raised his head and looked Alec Rush in the eye — held his gaze with brown eyes that were doggedly level.

“The fact is,” he said quietly, “that I asked Sara Falsoner to marry me the day she left.”

“Yeah. And she—?”

“And she — I suppose it was my fault. I was clumsy, crude, whatever you like. God knows what she thought — that I was asking her to marry me out of pity, that I was trying to force her into marriage by discharging her when I knew she was over her head in debt! She might have thought anything. Anyhow, it was — it was disagreeable.”

“You mean she not only refused you, but was — well — disagreeable about it?”

“I do mean that.”

Alec Rush sat back in his chair and brought fresh grotesqueries into his face by twisting his thick mouth crookedly up at one corner. His red eyes were evilly reflective on the ceiling.

“The only thing for it,” he decided, “is to go to Landow and give him what we’ve got.”

“But are you sure he —?” Millar objected indefinitely.

“Unless he’s one whale of an actor, he’s a lot in love with his wife,” the detective said with certainty. “That’s enough to justify taking the story to him.”

Millar was not convinced.

“You’re sure it would be wisest?”

“Yeah. We’ve got to go to one of three people with the tale — him, her, or the police. I think he’s the best bet, but take your choice.”

The younger man nodded reluctantly.

“All right. But you don’t have to bring me into it, do you?” he said with quick alarm. “You can handle it so I won’t be involved. You understand what I mean? She’s his wife, and it would be —”

“Sure,” Alec Rush promised; “I’ll keep you covered up.”

Hubert Landow, twisting the detective’s card in his fingers, received Alec Rush in a somewhat luxuriously furnished room in the second story of the Charles-Street Avenue house. He was standing — tall, blond, boyishly handsome — in the middle of the floor, facing the door, when the detective — fat, grizzled, battered, and ugly — was shown in.

“You wish to see me? Here, sit down.”

Hubert Landow’s manner was neither restrained nor hearty. It was precisely the manner that might be expected of a young man receiving an unexpected call from so savage-visaged a detective.

“Yeah,” said Alec Rush as they sat in facing chairs. “I’ve got something to tell you. It won’t take much time, but it’s kind of wild. It might be a surprise to you, and it might not. But it’s on the level. I don’t want you to think I’m kidding you.”

Hubert Landow bent forward, his face all interest.

“I won’t,” he promised. “Go on.”

“A couple of days ago I got a line on a man who might be tied up in a job I’m interested in. He’s a crook. Trailing him around, I discovered he was interested in your affairs, and your wife’s. He’s shadowed you and he’s shadowed her. He was loafing down the street from a Mount Royal Avenue apartment that you went in yesterday, and he went in there later himself.”