pale with excitement, gazed intently into the distorted face.
"God of mercy!" he suddenly cried, "it is Manton!"

"You are right," said King, with an evident attempt at calmness: "I knew
Manton. He then wore a full beard and his hair long, but this is he."

He might have added: "I recognized him when he challenged Rosser. I told
Rosser and Sancher who he was before we played him this horrible trick.
When Rosser left this dark room at our heels, forgetting his outer
clothing in the excitement, and driving away with us in his shirt
sleeves--all through the discreditable proceedings we knew with whom we
were dealing, murderer and coward that he was!"

But nothing of this did Mr. King say. With his better light he was
trying to penetrate the mystery of the man's death. That he had not once
moved from the corner where he had been stationed; that his posture was
that of neither attack nor defense; that he had dropped his weapon; that
he had obviously perished of sheer horror of something that he
_saw_--these were circumstances which Mr. King's disturbed intelligence
could not rightly comprehend.

Groping in intellectual darkness for a clew to his maze of doubt, his
gaze, directed mechanically downward in the way of one who ponders
momentous matters, fell upon something which, there, in the light of day
and in the presence of living companions, affected him with terror. In
the dust of years that lay thick upon the floor--leading from the door
by which they had entered, straight across the room to within a yard of
Manton's crouching corpse--were three parallel lines of
footprints--light but definite impressions of bare feet, the outer ones
those of small children, the inner a woman's. From the point at which
they ended they did not return; they pointed all one way. Brewer, who
had observed them at the same moment, was leaning forward in an attitude
of rapt attention, horribly pale.

"Look at that!" he cried, pointing with both hands at the nearest print
of the woman's right foot, where she had apparently stopped and stood.
"The middle toe is missing--it was Gertrude!"

Gertrude was the late Mrs. Manton, sister to Mr. Brewer.

The Shell of Sense

BY OLIVIA HOWARD DUNBAR

From Harper's Magazine, December, 1908. By permission of Harper and
Brothers and Olivia Howard Dunbar.

It was intolerably unchanged, the dim, dark-toned room. In an agony of
recognition my glance ran from one to another of the comfor