ra queried quickly, her face paling to a perceptible
degree.

I turned to her with the cheeriest smile I could muster at the moment.
"He's guessed that we're engaged, Moira," I said. And the note of
exultation in my voice was more real than I had intended.

"It's not the time to be rejoicing over such things," I rattled on,
"but--well, I suppose we're all young only once and we've got to make
the best of it."

The sergeant was a gem of his kind, and even the nearness of a tragedy
and the rigidness of the rules that governed his daily life had not
crushed out of him that little touch of Nature that makes the whole
world kin. Thanks to the easiness of my manner and his own ready
stumbling into the trap I had not set for him, he now looked upon me as
nothing more than a love-sick youth with no eyes for anyone or anything
save the girl who occupied his heart. If the man could only have seen
what was in my mind, if by any chance he had overheard our conversation
on the morning of the burglary, how quickly he would have changed his
good opinion of us both. But luckily he was no mind-reader, and my
little piece of bluff achieved more success than was its due.

"You needn't worry about anything," he said with an almost paternal note
in his voice. "We police have certain duties to carry out, but we're
human after all, and anything I can do as a man and a brother I'll be
only too pleased to have you ask."

"Thank you," I said, with gratitude that was less than half feigned.

The divisional surgeon gave it as his opinion that death had been
practically instantaneous. The bullet had entered the wall of the chest
a little too close to the heart to be pleasant. The doctor did tell me
just what else had happened, but either he did not make himself clear or
I have forgotten it.

Presently a couple of the police who had been put on the trail of the
fugitive returned and reported nothing doing. The garden just outside
the window was a good deal trampled about, and there were footmarks in
plenty on the soft soil, but, as the sergeant remarked, "Footmarks are
like finger prints--they're no use unless you know who made them." All
things considered, it looked as if our man had got clean away again. I
had a fancy that neither Moira nor I had seen the last of him. Standing
there in the very room that had witnessed the tragedy, with the body of
the murdered man hanging limply in the chair, the lifeless clay scarcely
yet cold, it came to