ain. "Mr. Sloane, this
man's been working against me from the start. Think a moment, and you'll
realize it. While he was telling your daughter and a whole lot of other
people that I was the only man to handle the case, he was slipping you
the quiet instruction to avoid me, not to confide in me, not to tell me
a single thing. Isn't that true?"

"We-ell, he did say the best way for me to avoid all possibility of
being involved in the thing was not to talk to anybody."

"I knew it!" Hastings declared, giving his contempt full play. "And he
persuaded you that you might have seen--_might_, mind you--and he gave
you the suggestion skilfully, more by indirection than by flat
statement--that you might have seen Berne Webster out there on the lawn
that night, when you were uncertain, when you feared it yourself--a
little. Isn't that true?"

Sloane looked at him with widening eyes, his lips trembling.

"Come, Mr. Sloane! Let's play fair, didn't he?"

"We-ell, yes."

"And," Hastings continued, thumping the table with a heavy hand to drive
home the points of his statement, "he persuaded you to offer that money
to Mrs. Brace--last Tuesday night.--Didn't he?--And that matches his
slippery cunning in pretending he was saving Webster by hiding the fact
that Webster's hand had gagged him when they found the body. He figured
his willingness to help somebody else would keep suspicion away from
him. I----"

"Rot! All rot!" Wilton broke in. "Where do you think you are, Arthur, on
the witness stand? He'll have you saying white's black in a minute."

"Mr. Sloane," the detective said, getting to his feet, "he induced you
to pay money to Mrs. Brace--while it's the colour of blackmail, it won't
be a matter for prosecution; you gave it to her, in a sense,
unsolicited--but he induced you to do that because he knew she was out
for blackmail. He hoped that, if you bought her off, she wouldn't pursue
him farther."

"Farther!" echoed Sloane. "What do you mean by that?"

"Why, man! Don't you see? Money was back of all that tragedy. He
murdered the girl because she had come here to renew her mother's
attempts at blackmail on him! Not content with duping you, with handling
you as if you'd been a baby, he put you up to buying off the woman who
was after him--and he did it by fooling you into thinking that you were
saving the name, if not the very life, of your daughter's fiance!
He----"

"Lies! Wild lie!" thundered Wilton, pushing back from