He put the card down gently and stared at it for some seconds. Then with some actions as deft and precise as those of an automatic machine, he addressed it in the same upstanding print letters and sealed it, pressing the ball of his right thumb firmly into the warm wax. He glanced across at a photograph on the polished surface of his desk, the photograph of an unusually charming-looking girl, who peeped out at him with merry impudence from behind a mass of flowers held to her breast. It was signed "Happy memories, Mercia Lyall." Just for a moment the hand that held the envelope trembled perceptibly and the frown on his forehead intensified till the deep brows almost hid his eyes. then with a sudden shrug and an irritated click of the tongues he stuffed it into his pocket and called for his car.   Valmon Dain, even among a crowd of unusual men, would have stood out prominently as an exceptionally curious study.  To begin with, he was admitt

even they had no knowledge of the amazing transformation that had been effected in their own property. the place was no longer an office with a tiny annexe. it was a Network of shinning wires and little polished dials set row on row all round the walls. Dain himself had carried up the various fittings an inconceivable number of journeys , and had assemble them with a patience that was as precise and unflagging as the skill employed in their making. And the thing had grown on him. only Dain himself knew how tremendously this hobby of his had become his dominating master. imperceptibly at first, but with a dreadful surety it had come to be the be-all and end-all of his existence. Very slowly his old haunts ceased to know him. his own home out at Hendon became little more to him than an occasional bedroom. Dain was a sporadic lodger in his own house. Equally slowly he became more and more Mr. Landring Dent, of the top floor offices in kingsway. That was Valmon

He put his headphones on again and connected his contract key with another little nickel dial on which the single ting of a bell had just sounded. For many seconds he listened with straining intentness, his left hand fiddling about abstractedly among the mass of cross-connecting wires by his shoulder. Then he muttered, "Bah!-----nothing but a sheaf of drunk and disorderly is!" He pulled off his phones, tossed them on to a baize-covered table, and went out. patent locks clicked into place as the door closed behind him. He hurried downstairs and let himself out into the fresh windy sweep of kingsway. "Taxi," he called, as a driver looked inquiringly at him from the kerb. "Where to sir?" The driver reached behind to open the door. "Greydene---Mr. Willard Lyall's house, Highgate," He said as he climbed in. "it's just off the main road. I'll stop you when you get there."  For some minutes, Dai

Good Lord!" he muttered under his breath; what a perfectly appalling situation. Lyall, Willard Lyall a member of the silver Arrow Group and father of Mercia! And I've sent him to pentonville. I've shut him up in a penal cell just as surely as though I turned the key in him myself. the Yard will act on intimation no 34 with absolute certainty. they always have acted on my cards ever since intimation no 4 anyway, when even officialdom began to realise that.....phew! Delivery and Shaughnessy have already got the net out. they're closing in on Lyall as surely as darkness closes over the day." He tried to untangle the maze, but his jaded brain could find no pin-point of light. The posting of that letter had amassed around him a mountain of such unscalable difficulties that he felt himself getting tinier and more abjectly helpless with every minute that passed. In moments of crisis, a man is apt to resort to panic measures and in so doing it is just possible that

Willard Lyall came down to breakfast and glanced at his mail. it was a fairly large pile, but nothing more than usual. Mercia often twitted him with the fact that he seemed to do most of his business by correspondence at home. He tossed one or two letters aside, matters of small moments, thrust one or two others into an inside pocket without opening them and then picked up a plain post-card. it was addressed to him in neat, upright capitals and note the London post-mark across the stamp. The date of posting was blurred and scarcely decipherable. He turned it over in curiously . on the reverse side also in black print letters, was a single sentence. A slow frown spread over his face as he read it. His hand shook and he dropped the card suddenly to the table. There was a sickly, unhealthy pallor crawling slowly over his skin, but the dark brows had come down over his eyes like a thunder cloud.   He read the extraordinary thing again and a lo