eatly. I did not think she would ever have the pluck to visit
this house again after what happened at her wedding."

"She has had the pluck," I assured him; "and what is more, she has
had enough of it not only to reenter the house, but to reenter it
alone. At least, such is the present inference. Had you been
blessed with more curiosity and made more frequent use of the chair
so conveniently placed for viewing the opposite house, you might
have been in a position to correct this inference. It would help
the police materially to know positively that she had no companion
in her fatal visit."

"Fatal?" he repeated, running his finger inside his neckband, which
suddenly seemed to have grown too tight for comfort. "Can it be
that my niece has been frightened to death in that old place? You
alarm me."

He did not look alarmed, but then he was not of an impressible
nature. Yet he was of the same human clay as the rest of us, and,
if he knew no more of this occurrence than he tried to make out,
could not be altogether impervious to what I had to say next.

"You have a right to be alarmed," I assented. "She was not
frightened to death, yet is she lying dead on the library floor."
Then, with a glance at the windows about me, I added lightly: "I
take it that a pistol-shot delivered over there could not be heard
in this room."

He sank rather melodramatically into his seat, yet his face and
form did not lose that sudden assumption of dignity which I had
observed in him ever since my entrance into the house.

"I am overwhelmed by this news," he remarked. "She has shot
herself? Why?"

"I did not say that she had shot herself," I carefully repeated.
"Yet the facts point that way and Mr. Jeffrey accepts the suicide
theory without question."

"Ah, Mr. Jeffrey is there!"

"Most certainly; he was sent for at once."

"And Miss Tuttle? She came with him of course?"

"She came, but not with him. She is very fond of her sister."

"I must go over at once," he cried, leaping again to his feet and
looking about for his hat. "It is my duty to make them feel at
home; in short, to--to put the house at their disposal." Here he
found his hat and placed it on his head. "The property is mine now,
you know," he politely explained, turning, with a keen light in his
gray eye, full upon me and overwhelming me with the grand air of a
man who has come unexpectedly into his own. "Mrs. Jeffrey's father
was my younger brother--t