the table. "I'm
through with----"

"No! No!" shrilled Sloane. "Wait! Prove that, Hastings! Prove it--if you
can! Shuddering saints! Have I----?"

He looked once at Wilton's contorted face, and recoiled, the movement
confessing at last his lack of faith in the man.

"I will," Hastings answered him, and moved toward the door; "I'll prove
it--by the girl's mother."

He threw open the door, and, sure now of holding Sloane's attention,
went in search of Mrs. Brace and the sheriff.

XXI

"AMPLE EVIDENCE"

The two men in the library waited a long time for his return. Wilton,
elbows on the table, stared straight in front of him, giving no sign of
knowledge of the other's presence. Sloane fidgeted with the
smelling-salts, emitting now and then long-drawn, tremulous sighs that
were his own special vocabulary of dissatisfaction. He spoke once.

"Mute and cringing martyrs!" he said, in suspicious remonstrance. "If
he'd say something we could deny! So far, Tom, you're mixed up in----"

"Why can't you wait until he's through?" Wilton objected roughly.

They heard people coming down the hall. Lucille, following Mrs. Brace
into the room, went to her father. They could see, from her look of
grieved wonder, that Hastings had told her of the charge against Wilton.
The sheriff's expression confirmed the supposition. His mouth hung open,
so that the unsteady fingers with which he plucked at his knuckle like
chin appeared also to support his fallen jaw. He made a weak-kneed
progress from the door to a chair near the screened fireplace.

For a full half-minute Hastings was silent, as if to let the doubts and
suspense of each member of the group emphasize his dominance of the
situation. He reviewed swiftly some of the little things he had used to
build up in his own mind the certainty of Wilton's guilt: the man's
agitation in the music room at the discovery, not that a part of the
grey envelope had been found, but that it contained some of the words of
the letter--his obvious alarm when found quarrelling with Mrs. Brace in
his office--his hardly controlled impulses: once, outside Sloane's
bedroom, to accuse Berne Webster without proof, and, on the Sloanehurst
porch last Sunday, to suggest that Sloane was guilty.

The detective observed now that he absolutely ignored Mrs. Brace, not
even looking in her direction. He perceived also how she reacted to that
assumed indifference. The tightening of her lips, the flutter of her