ried Grace. "You sprang at me----"

"My word is as good as yours," Miss Norman interrupted. "And my friend
here will bear out what I say." She nodded to Miss Ford. "You also," she
again faced Duvall, "broke into my apartment without warrant and killed
my pet monkey. You will have to answer for that as well. You have
accused me of sending threatening letters to this girl here. I defy you
to prove it."

Duvall, who had been coming nearer the woman all the time, reached out
and snatched from her hands the umbrella she held. The others in the
room regarded him with astonishment. The woman herself gave a cry of
anger, and starting forward tried to recover her lost property.

Duvall yielded it to her at once, but not before he had torn from the
handle two small round balls covered with knitted silk that hung from it
by a heavy silken cord.

Miss Norman, seeing what he had done, drew back with a cry of anger. A
few incoherent words trailed from her lips. Duvall, paying no attention
to her, ripped open one of the silk-meshed coverings and extracted from
it a small, round black object about the size of a hickory nut.

He gazed at it for a moment, then going quickly to the table in the
center of the room brought the thing down smartly upon its surface.

There was a crackling sound, and bits of some black substance flew in
every direction. A moment later the detective raised in his hand a
glittering bit of metal and held it up so that the others might see it.

"The death's-head seal," he said, quietly.

Miss Norman fell on her knees before Ruth Morton, her hands upraised.

"Forgive me--forgive me!" she sobbed.

CHAPTER XXI

"In reconstructing the case from the beginning," Duvall said, later in
the day, "one fact stands out with especial prominence--the almost total
absence of any definite clues."

He was sitting in the library of the Morton apartment, and with him were
his wife, Mrs. Morton and Ruth.

"The thing was certainly very cleverly done," Mrs. Morton remarked. "I
still do not understand it in the least. How, for instance, were the
letters placed in my daughter's room?"

"I am coming to that," replied Duvall. "But first I will run over the
case in the light of Miss Norman's confession to me so that you may
understand it thoroughly and decide what action you wish to take against
her and her sister, Miss Ford."

"Her sister?"

"Yes. The woman's name is not Norman. It is Ford--Jane Ford. Norman is
a