e, the hand that lay in mine was burning with fever.

"And--after that," Mr. Jamieson went on, "you went directly to bed?"

Gertrude hesitated.

"No," she said finally. "I--I am not nervous, and after I had
extinguished the light, I remembered something I had left in the
billiard-room, and I felt my way back there through the darkness."

"Will you tell me what it was you had forgotten?"

"I can not tell you," she said slowly. "I--I did not leave the
billiard-room at once--"

"Why?" The detective's tone was imperative. "This is very important,
Miss Innes."

"I was crying," Gertrude said in a low tone. "When the French clock in
the drawing-room struck three, I got up, and then--I heard a step on
the east porch, just outside the card-room. Some one with a key was
working with the latch, and I thought, of course, of Halsey. When we
took the house he called that his entrance, and he had carried a key
for it ever since. The door opened and I was about to ask what he had
forgotten, when there was a flash and a report. Some heavy body
dropped, and, half crazed with terror and shock, I ran through the
drawing-room and got up-stairs--I scarcely remember how."

She dropped into a chair, and I thought Mr. Jamieson must have
finished. But he was not through.

"You certainly clear your brother and Mr. Bailey admirably," he said.
"The testimony is invaluable, especially in view of the fact that your
brother and Mr. Armstrong had, I believe, quarreled rather seriously
some time ago."

"Nonsense," I broke in. "Things are bad enough, Mr. Jamieson, without
inventing bad feeling where it doesn't exist. Gertrude, I don't think
Halsey knew the--the murdered man, did he?"

But Mr. Jamieson was sure of his ground.

"The quarrel, I believe," he persisted, "was about Mr. Armstrong's
conduct to you, Miss Gertrude. He had been paying you unwelcome
attentions."

And I had never seen the man!

When she nodded a "yes" I saw the tremendous possibilities involved.
If this detective could prove that Gertrude feared and disliked the
murdered man, and that Mr. Armstrong had been annoying and possibly
pursuing her with hateful attentions, all that, added to Gertrude's
confession of her presence in the billiard-room at the time of the
crime, looked strange, to say the least. The prominence of the family
assured a strenuous effort to find the murderer, and if we had nothing
worse to look forward to, we were sure of a distastef