rnine persistence.

"Well, then," he blustered, "did he kill him?"

The nod of his head was toward Dick. Then, as she remained silent: "I'm
talking to you!" he snapped. "Did he kill him?"

The reply came with a soft distinctness that was like a crash of
destiny.

"Yes."

Dick turned to his wife in reproachful amazement.

"Mary!" he cried, incredulously. This betrayal was something
inconceivable from her, since he believed that now at last he knew her
heart.

Burke, however, as usual, paid no heed to the niceties of sentiment.
They had small place in his concerns as an official of police. His sole
ambition just now was to fix the crime definitely on the perpetrator.

"You'll swear he killed him?" he asked, briskly, well content with this
concrete result of the entanglement.

Mary subtly evaded the question, while seeming to give unqualified
assent.

"Why not?" she responded listlessly.

At this intolerable assertion as he deemed it, Edward Gilder was
reanimated. He sat rigidly erect in his, chair. In that frightful
moment, it came to him anew that here was in verity the last detail in a
consummate scheme by this woman for revenge against himself.

"God!" he cried, despairingly. "And that's your vengeance!"

Mary heard, and understood. There came an inscrutable smile on her
curving lips, but there was no satisfaction in that smile, as of one who
realized the fruition of long-cherished schemes of retribution. Instead,
there was only an infinite sadness, while she spoke very gently.

"I don't want vengeance--now!" she said.

"But they'll try my boy for murder," the magnate remonstrated,
distraught.

"Oh, no, they can't!" came the rejoinder. And now, once again, there
was a hint of the quizzical creeping in the smile. "No, they can't!"
she repeated firmly, and there was profound relief in her tones since
at last her ingenuity had found a way out of this outrageous situation
thrust on her and on her husband.

Burke glared at the speaker in a rage that was abruptly grown suspicious
in some vague way.

"What's the reason we can't?" he stormed.

Mary sprang to her feet. She was radiant with a new serenity, now that
her quick-wittedness had discovered a method for baffling the mesh of
evidence that had been woven about her and Dick through no fault
of their own. Her eyes were glowing with even more than their usual
lusters. Her voice came softly modulated, almost mocking.

"Because you couldn't convict