."

"I do not know yet," replied Muller slowly, "but I will find out, I
generally do."

"Oh, to think that I should have done that poor man such an injustice!
It is terrible, terrible! This house has been ghastly these days.
His poor aunt knows that he is innocent--she could never believe
otherwise--she has felt the hideous suspicion in my mind--it has made
her suffering worse--will they ever forgive me?"

"Her joy, if I can free her nephew, will make her forget everything. Go
to her now, Miss Roemer, comfort her with the assurance that you also
believe him to be innocent. I must hasten back to G---- and go on with
this quest."

The girl stood at the doorway shaded by the overhanging branches of
two great trees, looking down the street after the slight figure of the
detective. "Oh, it is all easier to hear, hard as it is, easier now that
this horrible suspicion has gone from my mind--why did I not think of
that before?"

Alone in the corner of the smoking compartment in the train to G--,
Muller arranged in his mind the facts he had already gathered. He had
questioned the servants of John Siders' former household, had found
that the dead man received very few letters, only an occasional business
communication from his bank. Of the few others, the servants knew
nothing except that he had always thrown the envelopes carelessly in the
waste paper basket and had never seemed to have any correspondence which
he cared to conceal. No friend from elsewhere had ever visited him in
Grunau, and he had made few friends there except the Graumann family.

The facts of the case, as he knew them now, were such as to make it
extremely doubtful that Graumann was the murderer. Muller himself had
been inclined to believe in the possibility of a quarrel between the two
men, particularly when he had heard that Graumann himself was in love
with his handsome ward. But the second thought that came to him then,
impelled by the unerring instinct that so often guided him to the truth,
was the assurance that in a case of this kind, in a case of a quarrel
terminating fatally, a man like Albert Graumann would be the very first
to give himself up to the police and to tell the facts of the case.
Albert Graumann was a man of honour and unimpeachable integrity. Such
a man would not persist in a foolish denial of the deed which he had
committed in a moment of temper. There would be nothing to gain from it,
and his own conscience would be his severes