on Page's head.

"It was an inspiration that made me press the ruby into the soap; I
could n't have found a better hiding-place if I had searched the house
over."

I was no longer heeding him. The last doubt had been removed. After
all, then, Alfred Fluette was the guilty man.

My heart ached for the three women upon whom the blow would fall the
hardest. The tangle was unravelling in accord with my theory. I had
warned Genevieve of what she might expect--indeed, she had apprehended
the probable outcome herself; it had been hopeless to attempt to
prepare Belle. But all this failed to relieve the situation any.

However, the ruby presently rose uppermost in my mind, and with it came
a conviction that Burke had not told me everything that he might have
respecting the gem. If it had not been in the bar of soap, where was
it? Then light flashed upon the enigma.

Burke and the Burmese had been afforded more time than I in which to
speculate upon the substitution of the false for the genuine stone, and
Burke had not gone inconsiderately to the Page place on Friday night,
but, quite the reverse, to prosecute a definite plan of search. How
near he came to the goal I did n't appreciate till later.

The discovery by the Burmese that the soap contained merely the paste
replica, made them suspect Burke of duplicity. Hence, after Fanshawe
and I lost them Friday morning, the Burman had continued to dog the
ex-secretary until relieved some time during the day by the misshapen
dwarf, who, in turn, had followed him to the Page place after nightfall.

The mute--whose ugly visage Genevieve had seen at the alcove
curtains--had attacked him, perhaps in the belief that Burke had found
the gem, and that he had been deceiving them respecting it.

It was this struggle in the bedroom which had created such a tumult,
frightening Burke within an inch of his life, and driving him pellmell
away and to his bed, where he had remained until the following Tuesday.
Both had utterly vanished by the time I effected an entrance to the
house.

"I can truthfully say, Burke," I confided, "that I never underestimated
your intelligence. You did not go blindly to the Page place Friday
night. You reasoned that, if Mr. Page displayed the genuine ruby to
Maillot, and if the jewel-case contained only the replica when you
robbed the safe an hour or so later, why, the substitution must have
occurred somewhere between the library table, where Maillot