THE EDINBURGH MYSTERY The man in the corner had not enjoyed his lunch.

Miss Polly Burton could see that he had something on his mind, for, even before he began to talk that morning, he was fidgeting with his bit of string, and setting all her nerves on the jar.
"Have you ever felt real sympathy with a criminal or a thief ?" he asked her after a while.
"Only once, I think," she replied, "and then I am not quite sure that the unfortunate woman who did enlist my sympathies was the criminal you make her out to be." "You mean the heroine of the York mystery ?" he replied blandly.

"I know that you tried very hard that time to discredit the only possible version of that mysterious murder, the version which is my own.

Now, I am equally sure that you have at the present moment no more notion as to who killed and robbed poor Lady Donaldson in Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, than the police have themselves, and yet you are fully prepared to pooh-pooh my arguments, and to disbelieve my version of the mystery.

Such is the lady journalist's mind." "If you have some cock-and-bull story to explain that extraordinary case," she retorted, "of course I shall disbelieve it.