s you wish," he said, and turned to the paper, which he
dated as from his hotel. Mrs. Manderson looked down at his bent head
with a gentle light in her eyes, and made as if to place a smoothing
hand upon his rather untidy crop of hair. But she did not touch it.
Going in silence to the piano, she began to play very softly. It was ten
minutes before Trent spoke.

"At last I am his faithfully. Do you want to see it?"

She ran across the twilight room, and turned on a reading lamp beside
the escritoire. Then, leaning on his shoulder, she read what follows:

Dear Mr. Marlowe:

You will perhaps remember that we met, under unhappy circumstances,
in June of last year at Marlstone.

On that occasion it was my duty, as representing a newspaper, to
make an independent investigation of the circumstances of the death
of the late Sigsbee Manderson. I did so, and I arrived at certain
conclusions. You may learn from the enclosed manuscript, which was
originally written as a despatch for my newspaper, what those
conclusions were. For reasons which it is not necessary to state I
decided at the last moment not to make them public, or to
communicate them to you, and they are known to only two persons
beside myself.

At this point Mrs. Manderson raised her eyes quickly from the letter.
Her dark brows were drawn together. "Two persons?" she said with a note
of inquiry.

"Your uncle is the other. I sought him out last night and told him the
whole story. Have you anything against it? I always felt uneasy at
keeping it from him as I did, because I had led him to expect I should
tell him all I discovered, and my silence looked like mystery-making.
Now that it is to be cleared up finally, and there is no question of
shielding you, I wanted him to know everything. He is a very shrewd
adviser, too, in a way of his own; and I should like to have him with me
when I see Marlowe. I have a feeling that two heads will be better than
one on my side of the interview."

She sighed. "Yes, of course, uncle ought to know the truth. I hope there
is nobody else at all." She pressed his hand. "I so much want all that
horror buried--buried deep. I am very happy now, dear, but I shall be
happier still when you have satisfied that curious mind of yours and
found out everything, and stamped down the earth upon it all." She
continued her reading.

Quite recently, however, (the letter went on)