something unusual happen, and I've just remembered it, aided
thereto by your questions and Edwards' queer looks. Cheer up, old man;
we haven't all got your southern chivalry. From a plain, commonsense
point of view, what I have to tell is not in the least to my wife's
discredit. In fact, I'm proud of her all the way through."

Jim Edwards came suddenly and nervously to his feet, strode to the
further corner of the room and sat down at as great a distance from
Vandeman as its dimensions would permit. He turned his face to the small
window there, and through all that Vandeman said, kept up a steady,
maddening tattoo with his fingernails on the sill.

"This has to do with what I told you the first night I ever talked with
you, Boyne. You threw doubt on Thomas Gilbert's death being suicide. I
gave as a reason for my belief that it was, a knowledge and conviction
that the man's mind was unhinged."

Edwards' tattoo at the window ceased for a minute. He stared, startled,
at the speaker, then went back to it, and Vandeman proceeded,

"I'm not telling Jim Edwards anything he doesn't know, and what I say to
you, Boyne, that's discreditable to the dead, I can't avoid. Here it is:
on the evening of June first, 1916, I had dinner alone at home. You'll
find, if you look at an old calendar, that it falls on a Sunday. Jim
Edwards had dined informally at the Thornhills'. As he told it to me
later, they were all sitting out on the side porch after dinner, and
nobody noticed that Ina wasn't with them until they heard cries coming
from somewhere over in the direction of the Gilbert place. At my house,
I'd heard it, and we both ran for the garage, where the screams were
repeated again and again. We got there about the same time, found the
disturbance was in the study, and Edwards who was ahead of me rushed up
and hammered on its door."

Again Jim Edwards stopped the nervous drumming of his fingers on the
window-sill while he stared at the younger man as at some prodigy of
nature. Finally he seemed unable to hold in any longer.

"Hammered on the door!" he repeated. "If you're going to turn out the
whole damn' thing to Boyne, tell it straight; door was open; we couldn't
have heard a yip out of Ina if it hadn't been. Tom there in full sight,
sitting in his desk chair, cool as a cucumber, letting her scream."

"I'm telling this," Vandeman snapped. "Gilbert looked to me like an
insane man. Jim, you're crazy as he was, to say anything else.