stantly by a stir within; then, as the noble air
continued, awakening memories of that fatal instant when it crashed
through the corridors of the Hotel Clermont, drowning Miss Challoner's
cry if not the sound of her fall, a word burst from the sleeping man's
lips which carried its own message to the listening detective.

It was Edith! Miss Challoner's first name, and the tone bespoke a shaken
soul.

Sweetwater, gasping with excitement, caught the box from the shelf and
silenced it. It had done its work and it was no part of Sweetwater's
plan to have this strain located, or even to be thought real. But its
echo still lingered in Brotherson's otherwise unconscious ears; for
another "Edith!" escaped his lips, followed by a smothered but forceful
utterance of these five words, "You know I promised you--"

Promised her what? He did not say. Would he have done so had the music
lasted a trifle longer? Would he yet complete his sentence? Sweetwater
trembled with eagerness and listened breathlessly for the next sound.
Brotherson was awake. He was tossing in his bed. Now he has leaped
to the floor. Sweetwater hears him groan, then comes another silence,
broken at last by the sound of his body falling back upon the bed and
the troubled ejaculation of "Good God!" wrung from lips no torture could
have forced into complaint under any daytime conditions.

Sweetwater continued to listen, but he had heard all, and after some
few minutes longer of fruitless waiting, he withdrew from his post. The
episode was over. He would hear no more that night.

Was he satisfied? Certainly the event, puerile as it might seem to
some, had opened up strange vistas to his aroused imagination. The words
"Edith, you know I promised you--" were in themselves provocative of
strange and doubtful conjectures. Had the sleeper under the influence
of a strain of music indissolubly associated with the death of Miss
Challoner, been so completely forced back into the circumstances and
environment of that moment that his mind had taken up and his lips
repeated the thoughts with which that moment of horror was charged?
Sweetwater imagined the scene--saw the figure of Brotherson hesitating
at the top of the stairs--saw hers advancing from the writing-room, with
startled and uplifted hand--heard the music--the crash of that great
finale--and decided, without hesitation, that the words he had just
heard were indeed the thoughts of that moment. "Edith, you know I
pro