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The woman was staring at Constance.

“For example,” urged Constance, “I’m talking to you now as if I had known you for years. Why, Mrs. Douglas, men tell their most important business secrets to chance luncheon and dinner companions whom they think have no direct or indirect interest in them. Over tea-tables women tell their most intimate personal affairs. In fact, all you have to do is to keep your ears open.”

Mrs. Douglas had risen and was nervously watching Constance, who saw that she had made an impression and that all that was necessary was to follow it up.

“Now, for instance,” added Constance quickly, “you say she is a friend of yours. How did you meet her?”

Mrs. Douglas did not raise her eyes to Constance’s now. Yet she seemed to feel that Constance was different from other chance acquaintances, to feel a sort of confidence, and to want to meet frankness with frankness.

“One day I was with a friend of mine at the new Palais de Maxixe,” she answered in a low voice as if making a confession. “A woman in the dressing-room borrowed a cigarette. You know they often do that. We got talking, and it seemed that we had much in common in our lives. Before I went back to him–“

She bit her lip. She had evidently not intended to admit that she knew any other men. Constance, however, appeared not to notice the slip.

“I had arranged to meet her at luncheon the next day,” she continued hastily. “We have been friends ever since.”

“You went to luncheon with her, and–” Constance prompted.

“Oh, she told me her story. It was very much like my own–a husband who was a perfect bear, and then gossip about him that so many people, besides his own wife, seemed to know, and–“

Constance shook her head. “Really,” she observed thoughtfully, “it’s a wonder to me how any one stays married these days. Somebody is always mixing in, getting one or the other so wrought up that they get to thinking there is no possibility of happiness. That’s where the crook detective comes in.”

Anita Douglas, confidence established now, poured out her story unreservedly, as there was little reason why she should not, a story of the refined brutality and neglect and inhumanity of her husband.

She told of her own first suspicions of him, of a girl who had been his stenographer, a Miss Helen Brett.

But he was careful. There had never been any direct, positive evidence against him. Still, there was enough to warrant a separation and the payment to her of an allowance.

They had lived, she said, in a pretty little house in the suburb of Glenclair, near New York. Now that they were separated, she had taken a little kitchenette apartment at the new Melcombe. Her husband was living in the house, she believed, when he was not in the city at his club, “or elsewhere,” she added bitterly.

“But,” she confided as she finished, “it is very lonely here in a big city all alone.”

“I know it is,” agreed Constance sympathetically as they parted. “I, too, am often very lonely. Call on me, especially if you find anything crooked going on. Call on me, anyhow. I shall be glad to see you any time.”

The words, “anything crooked going on,” rang in Mrs. Douglas’s ears long after the elevator door had clanged shut and her new friend had gone. She was visibly perturbed. And the more she thought about it the more perturbed she became.

She had carried on a mild, then an ardent, flirtation with the man who had introduced himself as “Mr. White”–really Lynn Munro. But she relied on her woman’s instinct in her judgment of him. No, she felt sure that he could not be other than she thought. But as for Alice Murray and her friend whom she had met at the Palais de Maxixe–well, she was forced to admit that she did not know, that Constance’s warning might, after all, be true.