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Miss Laidlaw caught his eye and read in it that this was his way, under the circumstances, of asking her to keep in touch with him.

“I shall do so,” she promised.

We parted from Mrs. Barry at the door of her taxicab.

“A very baffling woman,” I remarked a moment later. “Do you suppose she is as intimate with Creighton as she implies?”

Kennedy shook his head. “It isn’t that that interests me most, just now,” he replied. “What I can’t figure out is Adele Laidlaw’s attitude toward both Creighton and Tresham. She seems to resent Mrs. Barry’s intimacy with either.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Sometimes I have thought she really cared for both–at least, that she was unable to make up her mind which she cared for most. Offhand, I should have thought that she was the sort who wouldn’t think a man worth caring much for.”

Kennedy shook his head. “Given a woman, Walter,” he said thoughtfully, “whose own and ancestral training has been a course of suppression, where she has been taught and drilled that exhibitions of emotion and passion are disgraceful, as I suspect Miss Laidlaw’s parents have believed, and you have a woman whose primitive instincts have been stored and strengthened. The instincts are there, nevertheless, far back in the subconscious mind. I don’t think Adele Laidlaw knows it herself, but there is something about both those men which fascinates her and she can’t make up her mind which fascinates her most. Perhaps they have the same qualities.”

“But Mrs. Barry,” I interrupted. “Surely she must know.”

“I think she does,” he returned. “I think she knows more than we suspect.”

I looked at him quickly, not quite making out the significance of the remark, but he said no more. For the present, at least, he left Adele Laidlaw quite as much an enigma as ever.

“I wish that you would make inquiries about regarding Mrs. Barry,” he said finally as we reached the subway. “I’m going down again to the little room we hired and watch. You’ll find me at the laboratory later tonight.”