't know. Certainly
I feel that the end will justify the means. I have an idea that I
can get from Miss Bond the only clue that I need, one that will lead
straight to the criminal. Who knows? I have a suspicion that the thing
I'm going to do is the highest form of your so-called ethics. If what
Fletcher tells us is true that girl is going insane over this thing.
Why should she be so shocked over the death of an uncle she did not
live with? I tell you she knows something about this case that it is
necessary for us to know, too. If she doesn't tell someone, it will eat
her mind out. I'll add a dinner to the box of cigars we have already bet
on this case that what I'm going to do is for the best--for her best."

Again I yielded, for I was coming to have more and more faith in the old
Kennedy I had seen made over into a first-class detective, and together
we started for the Greenes', Craig carrying something in one of those
long black handbags which physicians use.

Fletcher met us on the driveway. He seemed to be very much affected,
for his face was drawn, and he shifted from one position to another
nervously, from which we inferred that Miss Bond was feeling worse. It
was late afternoon, almost verging on twilight, as he led us through
the reception-hall and thence onto a long porch overlooking the bay and
redolent with honeysuckle.

Miss Bond was half reclining in a wicker chair us we entered. She
started to rise to greet us, but Fletcher gently restrained her, saying,
as he introduced us, that he guessed the doctors would pardon any
informality from an invalid.

Fletcher was a pretty fine fellow, and I had come to like him; but I
soon found myself wondering what he had ever done to deserve winning
such a girl as Helen Bond. She was what I should describe as the ideal
type of "new" woman,--tall and athletic, yet without any affectation
of mannishness. The very first thought that struck me was the
incongruousness of a girl of her type suffering from an attack of
"nerves," and I felt sure it must be as Craig had said, that she was
concealing a secret that was having a terrible effect on her. A casual
glance might not have betrayed the true state of her feelings, for her
dark hair and large brown eyes and the tan of many suns on her face and
arms betokened anything but the neurasthenic. One felt instinctively
that she was, with all her athletic grace, primarily a womanly woman.

The sun sinking toward the hills across t