oak, Wardrop's going to Mexico,
Schwartz will be next governor, and Miss Maitland's body will be found
in a cistern. The whole thing has petered out. What's the use of finding
the murderer if he's coated with asbestos and lined with money? Mike, I
want some more tea to drown my troubles."

We called up the hospital about ten-thirty, and learned that Mrs. Butler
was sinking. Fred was there, and without much hope of getting anything,
we went over. I took Burton in as a nephew of the dying woman, and I was
glad I had done it. She was quite conscious, but very weak. She told the
story to Fred and myself, and in a corner Burton took it down in
shorthand. We got her to sign it about daylight sometime, and she died
very quietly shortly after Edith arrived at eight.

To give her story as she gave it would be impossible; the ramblings of a
sick mind, the terrible pathos of it all, is impossible to repeat. She
lay there, her long, thin body practically dead, fighting the death
rattle in her throat. There were pauses when for five minutes she would
lie in a stupor, only to rouse and go forward from the very word where
she had stopped.

She began with her married life, and to understand the beauty of it is
to understand the things that came after. She was perfectly, ideally,
illogically happy. Then one day Henry Butler accepted the nomination for
state treasurer, and with that things changed. During his term in office
he altered greatly; his wife could only guess that things were wrong,
for he refused to talk.

The crash came, after all, with terrible suddenness. There had been an
all-night conference at the Butler home, and Mr. Butler, in a frenzy at
finding himself a dupe, had called the butler from bed and forcibly
ejected Fleming and Schwartz from the house. Ellen Butler had been
horrified, sickened by what she regarded as the vulgarity of the
occurrence. But her loyalty to her husband never wavered.

Butler was one honest man against a complete organization of
unscrupulous ones. His disgrace, imprisonment and suicide at the White
Cat had followed in rapid succession. With his death, all that was worth
while in his wife died. Her health was destroyed; she became one of the
wretched army of neurasthenics, with only one idea: to retaliate, to pay
back in measure full and running over, her wrecked life, her dead
husband, her grief and her shame.

She laid her plans with the caution and absolute recklessness of a
diseased me