osed her husband. "I'll let
you into a secret, Floyd. I've determined there shall be an end of this
folly. I have heard from him that he will be at home next week, and is
as firm as ever in his resolve to marry Miss Waring. I brought her here
so that she could not avoid meeting him. Now if you, Floyd, could only
manage--could look into this matter before the meeting, and set it to
rights, clear the poor child of this wretched suspicion that hangs about
her? Well, now you know why I have told you the story."

"You have certainly a sublime faith in Mr. Floyd's skill," said Scheffer
with a disagreeable laugh. "I wish him success." He rose with
difficulty, and wrapping his shawl about him, went feebly out of the
room.

"William is soured through his long illness," Beardsley hastened to say
apologetically. "And he cared more for Lou than I supposed. We were
wrong to bring him in this morning"; and he hurried out to help him up
the stairs. Mrs. Beardsley laid down her knitting, and glanced
cautiously about her. I saw that the vital point of her testimony had
been omitted until now.

"I think it but right to tell you--nobody has ever heard it
before"--coming close to me, her old face quite pale. "When I undressed
Louisa that night her shoes and stockings were stained, and a long
reddish hair clung to her sleeve. _She had trodden over the bloody
ground and handled the murdered man._"

Every professional man will understand me when I say I was glad to hear
this. Hitherto the girl's whim and the murder appeared to me two events
connected only by the accident of occurrence on the same day. Now there
was but one mystery to solve.

Whatever success I have had in my practice has been due to my habit of
boldly basing my theories upon the known character of the parties
implicated, and not upon more palpable accidental circumstances. Left to
myself now, I speedily resolved this case into a few suppositions,
positive to me as facts. The girl had been present at the murder. She
was not naturally reticent: was instead an exceptionally confiding,
credulous woman. Her motive for silence, therefore, must have been a
force brought to bear on her at the time of the murder stronger than her
love for Merrick, and which was still existing and active. Her refusal
to meet her lover I readily interpreted to be a fear of her own
weakness--dread lest she should betray this secret to him. Might not her
refusal to marry him be caused by the same fe