nity toward
the woman whom he loved.

"Not her!" he cried, imploringly. "You don't want her, Inspector! This
is all wrong!"

Now, at last, Mary interposed with a new spirit. She had regained,
in some measure at least, her poise. She was speaking again with that
mental clarity which was distinctive in her.

"Dick," she advised quietly, but with underlying urgency in her gently
spoken words, "don't talk, please."

Burke laughed harshly.

"What do you expect?" he inquired truculently. "As a matter of fact, the
thing's simple enough, young man. Either you killed Griggs, or she did."

The Inspector, with his charge, made a careless gesture toward the
corpse of the murdered stool-pigeon. For the first time, Edward Gilder,
as his glance unconsciously followed the officer's movement, looked and
saw the ghastly inanimate heap of flesh and bone that had once been a
man. He fairly reeled at the gruesome spectacle, then fumbled with an
outstretched hand as he moved stumblingly until he laid hold on a chair,
into which he sank helplessly. It suddenly smote upon his consciousness
that he felt very old and broken. He marveled dully over the
sensation--it was wholly new to him. Then, soon, from a long way off,
he heard the strident voice of the Inspector remorselessly continuing
in the vile, the impossible accusation.... And that grotesque accusation
was hurled against his only son--the boy whom he so loved. The thing
was monstrous, a thing incredible. This whole seeming was no more than
a chimera of the night, a phantom of bad dreams, with no truth under
it.... Yet, the stern voice of the official came with a strange
semblance of reality.

"Either you killed him," the voice repeated gratingly, "or she did.
Well, then, young man, did she kill him?"

"Good God, no!" Dick shouted, aghast.

"Then, it was you!" Such was the Inspector's summary of the case.

Mary's words came frantically. Once again, she was become desperate over
the course of events in this night of fearful happenings.

"No, no! He didn't!"

Burke's rasping voice reiterated the accusation with a certain
complacency in the inevitability of the dilemma.

"One of you killed Griggs. Which one of you did it?" He scowled at Dick.
"Did she kill him?"

Again, the husband's cry came with the fierceness of despair over the
fate of the woman.

"I told you, no!"

The Inspector, always savagely impressive now in voice and look and
gesture, faced the girl with satu