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than to begin that lesson with you.”
    “Thank you, Irene.” Godfrey’s jaw tightened; then he turned to me. “But I shall be lost without my faithful amanuensis. Nell, will you be so good as to take notes? We may as well treat this as a formal inquiry. If her family is as highly placed as I believe, the police may eventually figure in it.”
    “It may come to even more formality than a police inquiry,” Irene said grimly. “Behind the disparate pieces of this puzzle there lurks a vastly complex scheme that has shadowed many lives and threatens to cripple others before it is ended.” She went upstairs to fetch the unfortunate girl.
    “Doesn’t it strike you, Godfrey,” said I in her absence, “that Irene weaves conspiracy on a very broad loom? The likelihood of your happening to rescue a suicidal girl whose distress is related to a pair of tattooed sailors drowned in two great rivers many years apart—”
    “—is not the mad coincidence you hope, Nell.” He smiled, then winced as the expression stretched his scratches. “I was strolling by the Seine, puzzling over the tattoos, and was very near the spot where you and Irene saw the dead man drawn from the water. It was then that I noticed Louise thrashing about in the river.”
    “But that low, dead sailor could have had nothing to do with a genteel girl such as Louise!”
    Godfrey shrugged. “Irene is right. The sinews that bind together any sequence of events seldom resemble one another. Clues are no more than connective tissue, vital for their function, not for their substance.”
    Footfalls in the passage announced the girl’s approach under Irene’s gentle shepherding.
    Louise entered, and we both stared. Dried, brushed and soothed by an actress’s expert hands, she cut quite a different figure in our cozy, lamplit parlor, with its English chintz, rush-seated chairs and gathered draperies, than the one she had presented in the house of ill repute.
    Louise was a more weighty young woman than she had appeared at first; no wonder Godfrey had been hard put to rescue her. The lamplight revealed large, expressive, almost black eyes and shining, nutmeg-colored hair, a piquant but decidedly stubborn profile, and hands that seemed far too dainty to have inflicted the scratches that even now seared Godfrey’s cheeks.
    Eyes cast down, she settled into the chair Irene indicated and crossed her ankles. I noticed that Irene’s generosity had extended to the loan of my best black-kid house slippers and hoped that Louise’s equally generous feet would not stretch them.
    Godfrey and I knew, of course, that Irene already had plied our guest with soft, glancing queries; it was time for a concerted interrogation.
    “You are feeling better?” Godfrey began courteously.
    “I am dry, Monsieur, and warm. Yet I feel no better.” Even, white teeth pressed a pale lower lip. “Madame Norton has told you of the... attack?”
    “You must not blame yourself. It was through no fault of yours. Perhaps you would care to share the circumstances with us.” Louise remained silent. “As a barrister, I may find some way of discovering and punishing the culprits.”
    “What is there to discover?” the girl cried suddenly. “Except to know that these men are, were, mad!” The outburst propelled Louise forward, her white-knuckled hands clutching the arms of the chair.
    She sank back, exhausted and troubled, looking twice her likely age. “Oh, Monsieur Norton, your wife has assured me that you are a wise and sympathetic man, that your own sister was the victim of a similar senseless attack—”
    Here Godfrey and I looked to Irene, who shrugged as if to say: well, you gave me the notion, Godfrey....
    “I understand your interest,” Louise went on, “and I truly apologize for resisting your noble efforts to save me. I was quite mad in my own way by then, having awakened in a strange place in an even stranger condition. It was unclear in my mind what had happened; I assumed