'How do you mean?'

'I mean that I doubted the person, and refused to give her the bag.' And I hurriedly made confession, telling her how at last I was forced to read first her friend's letter and then her own, in order to learn her name, and that then her address was still a mystery. 'I had but one chance of finding you,' I concluded. 'You had informed your friend that your apartments were conveniently near the Fifty-seventh Street entrance.'

'Oh! Indeed!' I had seen the quick colour flash into her face at my mention of the letters, and of having read them, and the restraint was once more evident in face and voice when she said:

'I thank you, sir; but the contents of the bag—it was hardly worth the trouble you have taken to restore it—that is——'

'I have it with me, Miss Jenrys, and when I am sure that we are not under surveillance I will place it in your hands; and now I owe it to myself to make my own conduct in this affair and my present position clearer. At first it was with me a simple matter of returning a lost article to a lady. Failing to overtake you, I might perhaps have turned it over to some guard but for the interference of the brunette, who at once put me on the defensive and aroused my suspicion. It somehow seemed to me that the young person was more than commonly anxious to possess your bag, and then it occurred to me that the bag might contain something or some information that she especially wished to possess. My interest was aroused, and then I took the liberty of examining your bag, and having done so, I determined at least to attempt to return it to you, and to ask you to pardon the liberty I had taken with your correspondence.'

'I suppose anyone would have done the same,' she said, rather coldly. 'What I do not comprehend is why you did not return the bag to me in the presence of this person, of whom you might have warned me.'

'It is that which I am about to explain,' I replied gravely. 'And I must, for the sake of others whose interests I represent, ask you to regard what I am now about to tell you as a confidence made necessary because of the circumstances. Miss Jenrys, the card in your hand bears my real name, but few know me by it, because I so often bear others, as one of the necessities of my profession. I am known here to those who know me at all as one of those secret service men you have no doubt heard or read of. In other words——'

'A detective?' She bent forward and scanned my face narrowly.

'When I saw you in company with the little brunette, as I have since called her for want of a better title, I was at first amazed and inclined to doubt my own sagacity; but when—I am making a clean breast of it, Miss Jenrys—when I followed you, doubtful what course to pursue, I saw you joined by a gentleman, and I saw the brunette slip away from you as she would hardly have done, as you would hardly have allowed her to do, had she been friend or acquaintance. I am enrolled here as a "special," but I came, in company with another, with a definite object in view. Within these grounds are several persons under suspicion, and whom we are hoping to capture and convict, and when I tell you that only yesterday I learned that this same little brunette who claimed your property and friendship was seen in company with two suspected persons, you will hardly wonder that what I had attempted to do from purest courtesy from one stranger to another, and that other a lady, I felt impelled to do from a sense of duty, as well as desire to save one whom I had seen to be alone, and who might, for aught I could tell, be menaced by some unsuspected danger.'

There was no fear on her face, only a slightly troubled look, as she asked: