t her, a few rather
startling. She seemed a woman given to criminal impulses, and just the
sort who would perpetrate a thing such as the Stanwick affair."

"And she had a good face," said Nora. "I had specially noticed it. To
think," and the girl shivered, "that she should have been a suicide,
locked in her room, when the police came!"

"Fuller made a mistake in waiting when she refused to open the door,"
said Ashton-Kirk. "He should have broken it in."

"Her story of how the murder was done would have been interesting," said
Scanlon.

"I think I can, with Fenton's statement to help out, supply the main
points," said the investigator; "but of course they will lack the
personal touch. As I have worked it out, she sat reading, just as she
said; and she heard a greater part of what was talked of in the
sitting-room between Burton and his daughter, and afterward the son. I
have learned why the elder Burton went there that night. It was to call
up and confer with a shady dealer in diamonds--just such another as
Quigley. I have talked with this man. He said he'd had a call from the
Bounder, who told him he had a rich haul to dispose of. The time of this
call and the time of the Bounder's presence at No. 620 Duncan Street was
the same. But the place where they were to meet was never given to the
dealer, for the call terminated abruptly in a confusion of voices, and
then a blank silence which told him that the receiver had been hung up.
I explain this by reasoning it out that young Burton, indignant at what
was going forward, had torn his father away from the instrument before
the conversation had ended."

"But, if this is so, why did the Bounder ever go to No. 620 Duncan
Street to carry out a deal for stolen diamonds?" asked Scanlon. "There
were many perfectly safe places he could have picked."

"The answer to that probably lies in the nature of the man. He hated his
son and daughter; he knew his rascally doings gave them pain, and it may
have occurred to him as a delicious piece of humor to do this particular
thing before their eyes, depending upon their shame to keep them silent
afterward.

"All this talk of diamonds attracted the attention of the listening
nurse. She finally stole out of the house, took up the position at the
rose arbor and watched what was happening in the sitting-room. While she
was doing this, I think young Burton must have gone up-stairs, where he
was afterward seen by the maid. From what Fenton