f the old
man that, as they went down the driveway, he looked back at Sloanehurst
and felt keenly the sufferings of the people under its roof.

He was particularly drawn to Lucille Sloane, with whom he had had a
second brief conference. While waiting for his coffee--nobody in the
house had felt like breakfast--he had taken a chair at the southeast end
of the front porch and, pulling a piece of soft wood and a knife from
his Gargantuan coat-pockets, had fallen to whittling and
thinking.--Whittling, he often said, enabled him to think clearly; it
was to him what tobacco was to other men.

Thus absorbed, he suddenly heard Lucille's voice, low and tense:

"We'll have to leave it as it was be----"

Berne Webster interrupted her, a grain of bitterness in his words:

"Rather an unusual request, don't you think?"

"I wanted to tell you this after the talk in the library," she
continued, "but there----"

They had approached Hastings from the south side of the house and,
hidden from him by the verandah railing, were upon him before he could
make his presence known. Now, however, he did so, warning them by
standing up with a clamorous scraping of his feet on the floor.
Instinctively, he had recoiled from overhearing their discussion of what
was, he thought, a love-affair topic.

Lucille hurried to him, not that she had additional information to give
him, but to renew her courage. Having called upon him for aid, she had
in the usual feminine way decided to make her reliance upon him
complete. And, under the influence of his reassuring kindliness, her
hesitance and misgivings disappeared.

He had judged her feelings correctly during their conference in the
parlour. At dinner, she had seen in him merely a pleasant, quiet-spoken
old man, a typical "hick" farmer, who wore baggy, absurdly large
clothing--"for the sake of his circulation," he said--and whose
appearance in no way corresponded to his reputation as a learned
psychologist and investigator of crime. Now, however, she responded
warmly to his charm, felt the sincerity of his sympathy.

Seeing that she looked up to him, he enjoyed encouraging her, was bound
more firmly to her interests.

"I think your fears are unfounded," he told her.

But he did not reveal his knowledge that she suspected her father of
some connection with the murder. In fact, he could not decide what her
suspicion was exactly, whether it was that he had been guilty of the
crime or that he had g