"The woman seemed to draw out into a vapory nothingness and vanish like a puff of smoke."
"BUT, Madame, what you say is incredible," Jules de Grandin was saying to a fashionably dressed young woman as I returned to the consulting room from my morning round of calls.
"It may be incredible," the visitor admitted, "but it's so, just the same.I tell you she was there."
"Ah, Trowbridge, mon cher;," de Grandin leaped up as he beheld me in the doorway, "this is Madame Penneman. She has a remarkable story to tell.
"Madame," he bowed ceremoniously to our caller, "will you have the goodness to relate your ease to Dr. Trowbridge? He will be interested."
The young lady crossed her slender, gray-silk clad legs, adjusted her abbreviated black-satin dress in a manner to cover at least a portion of her patellæ, and regarded me with the fixed, dreamy stare of a pupil reciting a lesson learned by rote.
"My name is Naomi Penneman," she began; "my husband is Benjamin Penneman, of the chocolate importing firm of Penneman & Brixton. We have been married six months, and came to live in Harrisonville when we returned from our honeymoon trip, three months ago. We have the Barton place in Tunlaw Street."
"Yes?" I murmured.
"I heard of Dr. de Grandin through Mrs. Norman—she said he did a wonderful piece of work in rescuing her daughter Esther from some horrible old man—so I brought my case to you. I wouldn't dare go to the police with it."
"U'm?" I murmured. "Just what"
"It's about my husband," she
