busy with some object entirely removed from the person he addressed; but
at all events he rose, leaving me no alternative but to do the same.

"And so you didn't recognize the gentleman I brought to the neighboring
house just before twelve o'clock," he quietly remarked, with a calm
ignoring of my last question which was a trifle exasperating.

"No."

"Then, ma'am," he declared, with a quick change of manner, meant, I
should judge, to put me in my proper place, "I do not think we can
depend upon the accuracy of your memory;" and he made a motion as if to
leave.

As I did not know whether his apparent disappointment was real or not, I
let him move to the door without a reply. But once there I stopped him.

"Mr. Gryce," said I, "I don't know what you think about this matter, nor
whether you even wish my opinion upon it. But I am going to express it,
for all that. _I_ do not believe that Howard killed his wife with a
hat-pin."

"No?" retorted the old gentleman, peering into his hat, with an ironical
smile which that inoffensive article of attire had certainly not
merited. "And why, Miss Butterworth, why? You must have substantial
reasons for any opinion you would form."

"I have an intuition," I responded, "backed by certain reasons. The
intuition won't impress you very deeply, but the reasons may not be
without some weight, and I am going to confide them to you."

"Do," he entreated in a jocose manner which struck me as inappropriate,
but which I was willing to overlook on account of his age and very
fatherly manner.

"Well, then," said I, "this is one. If the crime was a premeditated one,
if he hated his wife and felt it for his interest to have her out of the
way, a man of Mr. Van Burnam's good sense would have chosen any other
spot than his father's house to kill her in, knowing that her identity
could not be hidden if once she was associated with the Van Burnam name.
If, on the contrary, he took her there in good faith, and her death was
the unexpected result of a quarrel between them, then the means employed
would have been simpler. An angry man does not stop to perform a
delicate surgical operation when moved to the point of murder, but uses
his hands or his fists, just as Mr. Van Burnam himself suggested."

"Humph!" grunted the detective, staring very hard indeed into his hat.

"You must not think me this young man's friend," I went on, with a well
meant desire to impress him with the impartiality of m