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only at the eleventh hour, had been designed to warn him to watch his step and be a bit more distant with the sex in future.
    There and then, he registered a vow that this should be attended to without delay. Girls in the past had spoken of J. G. Miller as "dear old Jeff" and "a scream." Girls from now on would be asking one another in awed whispers who that cold, stern man with the strange, inscrutable face was, who leaned against the wall with folded arms and seemed unaware of their existence.
    It was at this point that he happened to look round. His glance fell on the plate of rock cakes, lying untouched on their tray, and the sight brought him back to the present with a jerk.
    His immediate thought was that he had never beheld anything so uninviting. The things seemed to be leering at him malevolently. Too many cooks, in baking rock cakes, get misled by the word "rock," and it was into this category that Ma Balsam fell. And even if this had not been so, his stomach, which, though a healthy one, could be pushed just so far, rebelled at the thought of bilious patisserie on top of the generous spirit in which he had been indulging.
    And yet it was impossible to leave that heaped-up plateful for Ma Balsam to take away. She was so sensitive, and it so plainly untouched. Jeff was a nice-minded young man, who shrank from giving pain. The feelings of Ma Balsam were sacred to him.
    He was faced, accordingly, he saw, by the problem which was always bothering characters in the stories he wrote —viz. How to get rid of the body? And it was as he stood brooding on this that his eye chanced to fall on the room opposite, the one that bore on the upper half of its open window the legend "J. Sheringham Adair," and it was as if a sudden bright light had shone upon him.
    From where he was standing, he could see into this room, and it had all the appearance of being empty. The odd little wax-moustached blighter, whom he had sometimes seen sitting at the desk apparently engaged in putting top dressing on his upper lip, was not doing so now. Private Investigator Adair's private investigations had apparently taken him elsewhere for the moment, to a consultation at Scotland Yard perhaps or possibly to Joe the Lascar's opium den in Limehouse in connection with the affair of the Maharajah's Ruby.
    Whether this was so or not, on one point Jeff was clear. When Sheringham Adair returned, he might not have the Maharajah's Ruby in his possession, but he was going to be extraordinarily well off for rock cakes. With an accuracy of aim which gave evidence of the clear eye and the steady hand, he proceeded to hurl the contents of the plate across the courtyard.
    It was the fifth and last of the jagged delicacies that hit Chimp Twist. It caught him squarely between the eyes, creating the momentary illusion that the top of his head had parted from its moorings.
    For in supposing that Mr. Twist's office was empty, Jeff had erred. Its lessee was there, but a few moments earlier he had gone down on his hands and knees in quest of a dropped sixpence. A curious impression, that the air had suddenly become full of strange flying objects caused him to rise abruptly at precisely the worst time he could have chosen.
    An instant's stunned inaction, and he was at the window, rubbing his forehead. His gaze rested on a young man with straw-coloured hair and a contorted face, who seemed to glare at him with an evil, ferocious hostility. And there came to Chimp the feeling that had come to him so often in the course of his dubious career, that things were getting too hot.
    Nothing is more regrettable than the frequency with which these misunderstandings occur in life. We, who know the motives which had caused Jeff to throw rock cakes, are aware that his glare was one of horror and remorse. Quite inadvertently, meaning only to spare Ma Balsam's amour propre, he had gone and beaned one of the neighbours, and he stood aghast at his handiwork, too overcome to speak. Nobody,