How bromidic to note it--we have many tastes in common!
EX-STRAWBERRY MAN.
The third letter from her correspondent of the Agony Column increased
in the mind of the lovely young woman at the Carlton the excitement and
tension the second had created. For a long time, on the Saturday morning
of its receipt, she sat in her room puzzling over the mystery of
the house in Adelphi Terrace. When first she had heard that Captain
Fraser-Freer, of the Indian Army, was dead of a knife wound over the
heart, the news had shocked her like that of the loss of some old
and dear friend. She had desired passionately the apprehension of his
murderer, and had turned over and over in her mind the possibilities of
white asters, a scarab pin and a Homburg hat.
Perhaps the girl longed for the arrest of the guilty man thus keenly
because this jaunty young friend of hers--a friend whose name she did
not know--to whom, indeed, she had never spoken--was so dangerously
entangled in the affair. For from what she knew of Geoffrey West, from
her casual glance in the restaurant and, far more, from his letters, she
liked him extremely.
And now came his third letter, in which he related the connection of
that hat, that pin and those asters with the column in the Mail which
had first brought them together. As it happened, she, too, had copies
of the paper for the first four days of the week. She went to her
sitting-room, unearthed these copies, and--gasped! For from the
column in Monday's paper stared up at her the cryptic words to Rangoon
concerning asters in a garden at Canterbury. In the other three issues
as well, she found the identical messages her strawberry man had quoted.
She sat for a moment in deep thought; sat, in fact, until at her door
came the enraged knocking of a hungry parent who had been waiting a full
hour in the lobby below for her to join him at breakfast.
"Come, come!" boomed her father, entering at her invitation. "Don't sit
here all day mooning. I'm hungry if you're not."
With quick apologies she made ready to accompany him down-stairs.
Firmly, as she planned their campaign for the day, she resolved to put
from her mind all thought of Adelphi Terrace. How well she succeeded
may be judged from a speech made by her father that night just before
dinner: "Have you lost your tongue, Marian? You're as uncommunicative as a
newly-elected office-holder. If you can't get a little more life into
these expeditions of ours we'll pack up and head for home."