hunted down and brought in, Verrinder
fought an unknown poison with what antidotes he could improvise, and
saw that they merely added annoyance to agony.

His own failure had been unnerving. He had pursued this eminent couple
for months, trying in vain to confirm suspicion by proof and
strengthen assurance with evidence, and always delaying the blow in
the hope of gathering in still more of Germany's agents. At last he
had thrown the slowly woven net about the Weblings and revealed them
to themselves as prisoners of his cunning. Then their souls slipped
out through the meshes, leaving their useless empty bodies in his
care, their bodies and the soul and body of the young woman who was
involved in their guilt.

Verrinder did not relish the story the papers would make of it. So he
and the physician devised a statement for the press to the effect that
the Weblings died of something they had eaten. The stomach of Europe
was all deranged, and Sir Joseph had been famous for his dinners;
there was a kind of ironic logic in his epitaph.

Verrinder left the physician to fabricate and promulgate the story and
keep him out of it. Then he addressed himself to the remaining
prisoner, Miss Marie Louise Webling.

He had no desire to display this minnow as his captive after the
whales had got away, but he hoped to find her useful in solving some
of the questions the Weblings had left unanswered when they bolted
into eternity. Besides, he had no intention of letting Marie Louise
escape to warn the other conspirators and to continue her nefarious
activities.

His first difficulty was not one of frightening Miss Webling into
submission, but of soothing her into coherence. She had loved the old
couple with a filial passion, and the sight of their last throes had
driven her into a frenzy of grief. She needed the doctor's care before
Verrinder could talk to her at all. The answers he elicited from her
hysteria were full of contradiction, of evident ignorance, of
inaccuracy, of folly. But so he had found all human testimony; for
these three things are impossible to mankind: to see the truth, to
remember it, and to tell it.

When first Marie Louise came out of the avalanche of her woes, it was
she who began the questioning. She went up and down the room
disheveled, tear-smirched, wringing her hands and beating her breast
till it hurt Verrinder to watch her brutality to that tender flesh.

"What--what does it mean?" she sobbed. "What