"

"Well--she should worry! I've just finished with her list. Got an
unbreakable alibi."

"She would have," Barbara said listlessly. "She wasn't at the study that
evening."

"Huh! I worked on your tip that she was."

Barbara had pulled off the little stitched hat she wore; yet the deep
flush on her cheeks was neither from sun nor an afternoon's hard work.
It, and the quick straightening of her figure, the lift of her chin, had
to do with me and my activities.

"Mr. Boyne," the black eyes came around to me with a flash, "do you
suspect me of trying to pay off a spite on Ina Vandeman?"

"Good Lord--no!" I exploded. "And anyhow, I've just found that what you
imitated and Chung recognized, might as well have been the mother's
voice as the daughter's."

"Yes," she assented. "Any one of the family--under stress of emotion."
Then suddenly, "And why do I tell you that? You'll not get from it what
I do. I ought never to have mixed up my kind of mental work with other
people's. I'd promised my own soul that I would never make another
deduction. Then Worth came and asked me--that night at Tait's. I might
say now that I never will any more...." She broke off, storm in her eyes
and in her voice as she finished, "But I suppose if he wanted me to
again--I'd make a little fool of myself for his amusement just as I did
this time and have done all these other times!"

"I'll not ask anything more of you, Barbara," I said to her hastily,
confused and abashed before the glimpse she'd given me of her heart.
"Except that I beg you to stay good friends with Cummings. That man
hates Worth. If you turned him down now--say, for the ball, or anything
like that--he'd be twice as hard for us to handle. Keep him a passive
enemy instead of an active one, as long as he seems to find it necessary
to hang around Santa Ysobel."

"You know what's holding Mr. Cummings here, don't you?" She glanced
somberly past the bamboo gatherers to where we saw a gray corner of the
study with its pink ivy geranium blossoms atop. "Mr. Cummings is held
here by two steel bolts--the bolts on those study doors. Until he finds
how they can be moved through an inch of planking--he'll not leave Santa
Ysobel."

She'd put it in a nutshell. And I couldn't let him beat me to it. I'd
got to get the jump on him.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE MAGNET

I had all set for next morning: my roadster at Capehart's for repair,
old Bill tipped off that I didn't want any one but E