Conover with shooting irons in her hands, like a movie actress! She
heard a whistle. After this an interval of silence, save for the
ticking of the alarm clock on the stand. She eyed the blindfolded
men speculatively, swung out of bed, and put on her stockings and
sandals; then she sat on the edge of the bed and waited for the
sequence. Kitty Conover was going to have some queer recollections
to tell her grandchildren, providing she had any. That morning she
had risen to face a humdrum normal day. And here she was, at
midnight, hobnobbing with quiescent murder and sudden death!
To-morrow Burlingame would ask her to hustle up the Sunday stuff,
and she would hustle. She wanted to laugh, but was a little afraid
that this laughter might degenerate into incipient hysteria.

There was still in her mind a vivid recollection of her dream - the
fire of diamonds and the blonde girl with the tiara of rubies. Olga,
Olga! Russian; the whole affair was Russian. She shivered. Always
that land and people had appeared to her in sinister aspect; no
doubt an impression acquired from reading melodramas written by
Englishmen who, once upon a time, had given Russia preeminence as a
political menace. Russia, in all things - music, art, literature
- the tragic note. Stefani Gregor and Johnny Two-Hawks had roused
the enmity of some political society with this result. Nihilist or
Bolshevist or socialist, there was little choice; and Cutty sensibly
did not want her drawn into the whirlpool.

What a pleasant intimacy hers and Cutty's promised to be! And if
he hadn't casually dropped into the office that afternoon she would
have surrendered the affair to the police, and that would have been
the end of it. Amazing thought - you might jog along all your life
at the side of a person and never know him half so well as someone