mobile nostrils, left him no longer any doubt that she was in the mood
to give him the cooperation she had so bitterly promised.

"To be dragged down by such a woman!" he thought.

"Mrs. Brace," he said, "I've charged Judge Wilton with the murder of
your daughter. I say now he killed her, with premeditation, having
planned it after receiving a letter from her."

"Yes?" she responded, a certain tenseness in her voice.

She had gone to a chair by the window; and, like the sheriff, she faced
the trio at the table: Wilton, Sloane, and Lucille, who stood behind her
father, a hand on his shoulder.

Hastings slowly paced the floor as he talked, his hands clasped behind
him and now and then moving the tail of his coat up and down. He glanced
at Mrs. Brace over the rims of his spectacles, his eyes shrewd and keen.
He showed an unmistakable self-satisfaction, like the elation Wilton had
detected in his bearing on two former occasions.

"Now," he asked her, "what can you tell us about that letter?"

Wilton, his chest pressed so hard against the edge of the table that his
breathing moved his body, turned his swollen face upon her at last, his
eyes flaming under the thatch of his down-drawn brows.

Mrs. Brace, her high-shouldered, lean frame silhouetted against the
window, began, in a colourless, unemotioned tone:

"As you know, Mr. Hastings, I thought this man Wilton owed me money,
more than money. I'd looked for him for twenty-six years. Less than a
year ago I located him here in Virginia, and I came to Washington. He
refused my requests. Then, he stopped reading my letters--sent them back
unopened at first; later, he destroyed them unread, I suppose."

She cleared her throat lightly, and spoke more rapidly. The intensity of
her hate, in spite of her power of suppression, held them in a
disagreeable fascination.

"I was afraid of him, afraid to confront him alone. I'd seen him kill a
man. But I was in desperate need. I thought, if my daughter could talk
to him, he would be brought to do the right thing. I suppose," she said
with a wintry smile, "you'd call it an attempt to blackmail--if he had
let it go far enough.

"She wrote him a letter, on grey paper, and sent it, in an oblong, grey
envelope, to him here at Sloanehurst last Friday night. He got it
Saturday afternoon. If he hadn't received it, he'd never have been out
on the lawn--with a dagger he'd made for the occasion--at eleven or
eleven-fifteen, which was the