cried of new suspicions.

"Why, with Burke." The young man tried to be patient over her density in
this time of crisis.

"Who told you that I had arranged any such thing?" Mary asked. Now the
tenseness in her manner got the husband's attention, and he replied with
a sudden gravity, apprehensive of he knew not what.

"Burke himself did."

"When?" Mary was standing rigid now, and the rare color flamed in her
cheeks. Her eyes were blazing.

"Less than an hour ago." He had caught the contagion of her mood and
vague alarm swept him.

"Where?" came the next question, still with that vital insistence.

"In this room."

"Burke was here?" Mary's voice was suddenly cold, very dangerous. "What
was he doing here?"

"Talking to my father."

The seemingly simple answer appeared the last straw to the girl's burden
of frenzied suspicion. Her voice cut fiercely into the quiet of the
room, imperious, savage.

"Joe, turn on that light! I want to see the face of every man in this
room."

Something fatally significant in her voice set Garson a-leap to the
switch, and, in the same second, the blaze of the chandelier flamed
brilliantly over all. The others stood motionless, blinking in the
sudden radiance--all save Griggs, who moved stealthily in that same
moment, a little nearer the door into the passage, which was nearest to
him.

But Mary's next words came wholly as a surprise, seemingly totally
irrelevant to this instant of crisis. Yet they rang a-throb with an
hysterical anxiety.

"Dick," she cried, "what are those tapestries worth?" With the question,
she pointed toward the draperies that shrouded the great octagonal
window.

The young man was plainly astonished, disconcerted as well by the
obtrusion of a sordid detail into the tragedy of the time.

"Why in the world do you----?" he began, impatiently.

Mary stamped her foot angrily in protest against the delay.

"Tell me--quick!" she commanded. The authority in her voice and manner
was not to be gainsaid.

Dick yielded sullenly.

"Oh, two or three hundred dollars, I suppose," he answered. "Why?"

"Never mind that!" Mary exclaimed, violently. And now the girl's voice
came stinging like a whiplash. In Garson's face, too, was growing fury,
for in an instant of illumination he guessed something of the truth.
Mary's next question confirmed his raging suspicion.

"How long have you had them, Dick?"

By now, the young man himself sensed the fact that somethin