omise to keep my mouth shut."

"I know he sent for you," Garth said. "That's why I hoped to find you
here to-night. He suspected you were a go-between and that there might
be letters or something here to incriminate her with Treving."

Thompson nodded.

"I told the doctor, a few letters and trinkets. He said I must get them
as soon as the detectives had left and the house was clear. But I can
say, sir, there was never anything really out of the way. She wasn't
quite happy with the doctor. It would be a kindness to the dead--"

Garth smiled, turning to Nora.

"You wouldn't give me away, would you? All right, Thompson. Do what you
came to do."

Thompson shot him a grateful glance and returned to his obliterating
task at the desk. Garth snapped on the light.

"But, Jim," Nora asked, "how did you know that man had been a witness?
Was it a guess?"

Garth shook his head.

"Simple enough," he said.

He took a short, slender, silvery thread from his pocket. With a
shame-faced look he handed it to Nora.

"You'd know more about such things than I. It's a wire that made a
broken, worn-out rose look a whole lot better than it was. I found it
and the rose in the next room. I recognized it, because, Nora, when I
came to dinner the other night I stopped at a sidewalk stand and bought
a rose for my button-hole. Silly, wasn't it? But it was a good thing,
because I got stung with one of those. That's why I knew what the broken
stem and the wire meant. I learned that Randall didn't wear flowers, and
I made sure this afternoon what kind of a rose Treving would have worn.
Therefore, somebody else had been in that room, wearing a cheap rose
which he had almost certainly got at that cheap wedding. When I heard
Randall had sent for this man I decided to hold over my subpoenas for
the servants until to-morrow, and run out here myself as soon as the
detectives were called in--maybe get my man when he wouldn't lie."

Her eyes sparkled.

"And you guessed Randall didn't know about the murder when you caught
him?"

"After I had landed him in jail, his manner, taken with the rest of it,
worried me. If he wasn't guilty, why had he hidden all night and day?
What we found in the stone house answered that, and almost certainly put
it up to Mrs. Randall. Of course he guessed she had done it, and that
cleared her in his eyes. It's why he's been so sentimental about
protecting her memory. He didn't want it stained with murder, and he's
pr