“So-so, I believe,” replied Kilsip, shrugging his shoulders.

“Very ignorant—­could neither read nor write.”

“That accounts for her not asking for Fitzgerald when she called at the Club—­she probably did not know whom she had been sent for.  It will resolve itself into a question of identification, I expect.  However, if the police can’t find her, we will put an advertisement in the papers offering a reward, and send out handbills to the same effect.  She must be found.  Brian Fitzgerald’s life hangs on a thread, and that thread is Sal Rawlins.”

“Yes!” assented Kilsip, rubbing his hands together.  “Even if Mr. Fitzgerald acknowledges that he was at Mother Guttersnipe’s on the night in question, she will have to prove that he was there, as no one else saw him.”

“Are you sure of that?”

“As sure as anyone can be in such a case.  It was a late hour when he came, and everyone seems to have been asleep except the dying woman and Sal; and as one is dead, the other is the only person that can prove that he was there at the time when the murder was being committed in the hansom.”

“And Mother Guttersnipe?”

“Was drunk, as she acknowledged last night.  She thought that if a gentleman did call it must have been the other one.”

“The other one?” repeated Calton, in 8 puzzled voice.  “What other one?”

“Oliver Whyte.”

Calton arose from his seat with a blank air of astonishment.

“Oliver Whyte!” he said, as soon as he could find his voice.  “Was he in the habit of going there?”

Kilsip curled himself up in his seat like a sleek cat, and pushing forward his head till his nose looked like the beak of a bird of prey, looked keenly at Calton.

“Look here, sir,” he said, in his low, purring voice, “there’s a good deal in this case which don’t seem plain—­in fact, the further we go into it,—­the more mixed up it seems to get.  I went to see Mother Guttersnipe this morning, and she told me that Whyte had visited the ‘Queen’ several times while she lay ill, and that he seemed to be pretty well acquainted with her.”

“But who the deuce is this woman they call the ’Queen’?” said Calton, irritably.  “She seems to be at the bottom of the whole affair—­every path we take leads to her.”

“I know hardly anything about her,” replied Kilsip, “except that she was a good-looking woman, of about forty-nine—­she come out from England to Sydney a few months ago, then on here—­how she got to Mother Guttersnipe’s I can’t find out, though I’ve tried to pump that old woman, but she’s as close as wax, and it’s my belief she knows more about this dead woman than she chooses to tell.”

“But what could she have told Fitzgerald to make him act in this silly manner?  A stranger who comes from England, and dies in a Melbourne slum, can’t possibly know anything about Miss Frettlby.”

“Not unless Miss Frettlby was secretly married to Whyte,” suggested Kilsip, “and the ‘Queen’ knew it.”