alt in our work from sheer inability to make further
progress, these two, building on what we had done, and fresh and new to
the subject, might supplement our efforts and carry them on to some
definite result.

During the preceding week, the detective and myself had not been idle
nor had we worked altogether to no purpose, for we had secured one bit
of additional evidence that seemed to open a new field for
investigation, and it was this new matter with the other occurrences
that led up to it that I was now submitting to my friends.

The day after our interview with Mrs. Bunce, which resulted in the
finding of the missing money, Miles and I had resumed our work upon the
case, but from a new standpoint. After a consultation we had concluded,
as he had suggested, that we must look for the motive of the crime in
some object less commonplace than theft.

To assume that White had been murdered for the money and that it had
been abandoned almost immediately afterwards and without any apparent
occasion, was too unlikely to be tenable. To find another motive for the
crime, however, seemed next to impossible. If the object of the murderer
was not theft, then he must have had a personal interest to subserve in
the removal of White: but such an assumption involved the recognition of
some grave secret in the life of White and anything of that kind was
inconsistent with the life and habits of the man. I had known him long
and intimately, and knew no one whom I thought in character less devious
or secretive. His life had been that of any other idle man of means
about town. It had not even had a serious side to it that I had ever
observed, and I could not conceive of his having had an enemy who could
cherish animosity, much less a design upon his life.

Under these circumstances, as may be understood, it was with faint hope
that I undertook the new line of work; but there was no alternative,
for, as Miles had said, if I was right in my belief in Winters's
innocence, there must have existed some mystery in White's life to
explain his death, and if we were to save Winters, we must discover it.

Yielding to the force of this argument, therefore, I had sought another
interview with Benton and probed him upon every subject that could throw
any light upon White's private life or associations: but further than
some additional details of the intimacy with Belle Stanton, I learned,
as I had anticipated, nothing of any importance. If White