ld scarcely contradict her now.

"I'm sorry," I said abruptly, "that I had to tell that lie about our
being engaged. But I had to be as natural as I could, and the more
obvious an explanation I gave the better for us all."

She looked at me for a moment with unutterable things in the depths of
her golden-brown eyes.

"I'm sorry," she said slowly, "that you had to tell a lie."

I took her remark as the natural corollary of mine, but some
sub-conscious sense in me insisted that its very ambiguity was designed.

Almost at that moment I heard footsteps in the hall, and knew that the
servants had just come home. The big clock in the hall chimed ten.

"There's the women," I said. "You'd better tell them, and see they don't
make a scene."

Moira nodded and went down the hall to meet them.

There is little more to relate of this phase of my story. Naturally
there was an inquest, and just as naturally was a verdict returned of
"death at the hands of a person or persons unknown," or words to that
effect. The situation, in fine, was that Bryce was dead and buried, and
the police admitted that they held no clue to the identity of the
murderer. Motive there was none as far as they could see, and the whole
affair looked like one of these senseless crimes that from time to time
startle the city folk from their easy-going equanimity. The matter was
not even a nine-days' wonder, for other things occupied the attention of
the press, and a stickful was the most it ever got in any paper.

I stayed on in the house at Moira's request and attended to several
matters that were rather outside her province. The old man turned out
not to be as rich as we had thought, though he had money enough in
truth. The bulk of this went to Moira, with the curious proviso that she
could not invest it in any way without first submitting the proposal to
me and receiving my sanction. The will was of recent date, as a matter
of fact it had been drawn up within a few days of Moira's arrival. There
was a sum left to me, too, enough to make me independent for a good many
years to come.

Moira's mother arrived the day after the tragedy, and showed no very
evident intention of returning home. She was very nice to me, but then
there was no reason why she should have been anything else. Any strain
that there had been, and was still for that matter, was between her
daughter and myself, and, like a wise mother, she forebore from
interfering in what did not imme