all not go in!" she cried. "What business is it of his?"

She stood with her back to the door, her arms outstretched like a cross.
Her cheeks were livid. Her eyes seemed starting from her head.

Peter Ruff and John Dory laid their hands upon the girl's wrists. She
clung to her place frantically. She was dragged from it, screaming.
Peter Ruff, as was his right, entered first. Almost immediately he
turned round, and his face was very grave.

"Something has happened in here, I am afraid," he said. "Please come in
quietly."

On the bed lay Fluffy Dean, fully dressed--motionless. One hand hung
down toward the floor--from the lifeless fingers a little phial had
slipped. The room was full of trunks addressed to--

MISS SMITH,
Passenger to Melborne.
S.S. Caroline.

Peter Ruff moved over toward the bed and took up a piece of paper, upon
which were scribbled a few lines in pencil.

"I think," he said, "that I must read these aloud. You all have a right
to hear them."

No one spoke. He continued:

Forgive me, Letty, but I cannot go to Australia. They would only bring
me back. When I remember that awful moment, my brain burns--I feel that
I am going mad! Some day I should do this--better now. Give my love to
the girls.

FLUFFY.

They sent for a doctor, and John Dory rang up Scotland Yard. Letty Shaw
had fainted, and had been carried to her room. While they waited about
in strange, half-benumbed excitement, Peter Ruff once more spoke to
them.

"The reconstruction is easy enough now," he remarked. "The partition
between this sitting room and that little bedroom is only an artificial
one--something almost as flimsy as a screen. You see," he continued,
tapping with his knuckles, "you can almost put your hand through it.
If you look a little lower down, you will see where an opening has been
made. Fluffy Dean was being taken care of by Miss Shaw--staying with her
here, even. Miss Dean hears her lover's voice in this room--hears him
pleading with Miss Shaw on he night of the murder. She has been sent
home early from the theatre, and it is just possible that she saw or had
been told that Austen Abbott had fetched Miss Shaw after the performance
and had taken her to supper. She was mad with anger and jealousy. The
revolver was there upon the table, with a silver box of cartridges. She
possessed herself of it and waited in her room. What she heard