ad to know that it was she, in all innocence, who fired the shot
that killed her friend."

"It was," Dundee sighed. "But I believed that the only way I could make
Miles confess was to frighten him into thinking Flora would be killed in
the same manner.... Well, it worked!"

"Captain Strawn and I are still in the dark as to exactly how Miles
managed his wife's murder," Sanderson reminded him. "This morning you
chose to tell us nothing more than that a Hamilton man had married Nita
Leigh in New York in January, 1918, and that eight years ago, when he
saw her picture in _The Hamilton Evening Sun_, along with the story that
'Anita Lee' had committed suicide, he felt free to marry again.... You
said then you knew who the man was but you would not even tell us how
you knew--"

"Because I had very little actual proof then," Dundee answered. "As to
who he was, the salient clue had been staring me in the face the whole
time, but it was not until I was fooling with a set of anagrams last
night, idly spelling out the names of all the men who _might_ have
married her and then murdered her, that I saw it--"

"Saw _what_?" Strawn demanded irritably.

"That Selim is simply Miles spelled backwards," Dundee explained.
"Possibly because he considered it the sophisticated thing to do, Miles
used an assumed name at the party at which he met Nita Leigh--and
married her under that name shortly afterward. Even the first name,
'Mat', by which she knew him, was only his initials reversed."

"Simple--but clever," Sanderson commented.

"Just as were all of Miles' schemes after Nita, egged on by Sprague,
turned up in Hamilton to demand 'back alimony' as the price of her
silence.... But let me show you how he killed his wife."

He strode to the big bronze lamp. "It took me less than an hour today to
reconstruct the death machine so that it would be almost exactly as it
was when Miles finished his work just before 2:30 on Saturday, May
24--and as it remained until he had an opportunity to come back here and
dismantle it. Trust him to find out that the guard was removed from the
house Thursday!"

As he spoke, he was unscrewing the big, jewel-studded bowl of the bronze
lamp. Wedged, at a down-slanting angle inside the bowl, which was twelve
inches in diameter, was Judge Marshall's snub-nosed automatic, the
attached Maxim silencer projecting slightly from the hole whose jewel
was missing.

"Lydia told me last night over the telephone--and v