r;
however, there was a more insistent, underlying trouble struggling for
expression.

"But--Mr. Swift--do you think that this wheat deal has hurt Uncle
Alfred financially?"

Poor child! One could not smile at the simplicity of such a question.
I now thought I knew the foundation of this new fear that was gripping
at her heart. But I didn't--not entirely; there was another surprise
in store for me.

"It is very likely," I soberly made answer.

For all I knew to the contrary, his entire fortune might have been
wiped out in the crash; he might have been beggared, stripped utterly;
although, since he had not engineered the corner single-handed, he
would be obliged to meet only his proportion of the total loss,
whatever that might be. An outsider might only guess.

"It is not charitable to think or speak ill of the dead," she was
saying, "but, oh! what a cruel, pitiless man Mr. Page was. Think of
the long years of persecution Uncle Alfred has had to endure."

But I was regarding the matter from quite a different point of view. I
was thinking rather of that broken wheat corner as the culminating
stroke of an implacable enemy; of the probability that the rifled safe
contained more love-tokens similar to the card--so many more, in fact,
that the thief did not miss the one he had lost. I was thinking that
the warfare between the two men had its inception much farther back in
the past than anybody had ever imagined, and that it was no longer
strange why Page had wrested the ruby from his rival. One must
consider Fluette's passion for collecting rare gems to appreciate to
the full the consummate malice of that coup.

This disturbed pondering, however, carried me round in a circle. If
there had been love-tokens in the safe from Clara Cooper, Alfred
Fluette was the only man living who would have any interest in getting
them from Page. Again, if Page's hatred of Fluette was so intense that
he would part with a fortune merely to deprive his rival of a coveted
jewel, would he give this same jewel to a nephew for whom he
entertained no liking, knowing that the jewel was destined for his
enemy, simply upon that nephew's demand? Why, the bare grouping of the
facts discredited Maillot's story; he was left in a worse plight than
before.

I trust it is at least clear how heterogeneous were the elements of
this crime.

And then--to start swinging round the circle once more--if Alfred
Fluette was entirely blameless of F