e sight of her
face, of her mouth, paralyzed my voice.

"I stood on the porch and tried to scream, but at first I couldn't. I
only gasped and choked. I started down the steps, reached the bottom, and
then found I could make myself heard. I ran back up the steps and stood
there shrieking until I saw you coming. I suppose nobody had seen me go
down the steps."

"But that hasn't anything to do with Mr. Withers?"

"Yes--yes, it has. When I went down the porch steps, I saw something
lying in the grass, on the upper side of the steps, the side toward your
house."

She slipped her hand under one of the pillows.

"It was this."

She handed to Bristow an open-faced gold watch. He read on the back of it
the initials, "G. S. W."

"It's George Withers' watch," she said, "and, when I found it, he had not
been on this side of Manniston Road, according to the story he told you
and the chief of police."

Bristow was thinking intently, a frown creasing his forehead. He was
wishing that she had not found the watch. He reminded himself of the
hysterical condition she had been in the day before. Perhaps, after all,
this story was nothing but an unconscious invention--a fantasy which she
thought to be the truth.

"Why did you refuse yesterday to tell me this; and why do you volunteer
it now?" he inquired, holding her glance with a cold, level look.

"I'm afraid you won't understand," she answered, a little smile lifting
the corners of her mouth, a smile which, somehow, still had in it a great
deal of sorrow. "Yesterday I was still under the influence of the way I
had lived all my life, subjugated, as it were, by the fact that my older
sister was my father's favourite and by the further fact that my sister's
personality was stronger than mine--at least, I had been taught to think
so.

"I don't want you to think I didn't love my sister. I did; but it made a
cry-baby out of me. I always relied on others--do you see? But now, that
influence is gone. I'm my own mistress; and I know it. I can and must do
what strikes me as right."

Bristow, close student of human nature that he was, did understand. There
flashed across his mind a passage he had read in something by George
Bernard Shaw: that nobody ever loses a friend or relative by death
without experiencing some measure of relief.

"Yes; I see what you mean," he assented; "its an instance of submerged
personality--something of that sort."

"Mr. Braceway is working with you, is