ss Kelly smoothed the pillows
and readjusted the tumbled coverings.

Maria grasped her arm in a grip that hurt.

"But will you?" she demanded sharply. "Promise me!"

"Yes; indeed, I will. I promise."

Miss Kelly meant what she said. She was not anxious to be the recipient
of the sick girl's confidences.

CHAPTER X

EYES OF ACCUSATION

Bristow, at his early breakfast, devoted himself, between mouthfuls, to
the front page of _The Furmville Sentinel_. It was given up entirely to
the Withers murder.

"Murder--murder horrible and mysterious--was committed early yesterday
morning," announced the paper in large black-face type, "when the
beautiful and charming Mrs. Enid Fulton Withers, wife of George S.
Withers, the well-known attorney of Atlanta, was choked to death in the
parlour of her home at No. 5 Manniston Road. The most heinous crime that
has ever stained the annals of Furmville," etc.

The article went on to recite that Chief Greenleaf of the Furmville
police force had been fortunate in securing the assistance of a genius in
running down the various clues that seemed to point to the guilty party.
Mr. Lawrence Bristow, of Cincinnati, now in town for his health, had
worked with him all day in unearthing many circumstances "which, although
each of them seemed trivial, led when summed up to the almost irrefutable
conviction that the murder was done by a drunken negro, Perry Carpenter,"
etc.

In spite of this, the paper continued, the dead woman's husband, arriving
unexpectedly on the scene, had employed by wire Samuel S. Braceway, the
professional detective of Atlanta, who would reach Furmville early this
morning and, probably, work with Chief Greenleaf, Mr. Bristow, and the
plain-clothes squad in the effort to remove all doubts of the guilt of
the accused negro.

There followed a sketch of Braceway which was enough to convince the
readers that in him Mr. Withers had called into the case the shrewdest
man in the South, "very probably the shrewdest man in the entire
country."

"Evidently," Bristow was thinking when Greenleaf rang the door-bell,
"while I'm a 'genius,' Braceway's the man everybody relies on when it
comes to catching the murderer."

The chief was in a hurry, and the two men, going out of Bristow's back
door, walked down to the corner of the sleeping porch of No. 7, the
nurses' home. The frail wire fences that had served to partition the back
lots of Nos. 5, 7, and 9 had either fallen