ess than half an hour, they
brought in a verdict that Mildred Brace had been murdered by a thrust of
the "nail-file dagger" in the hands of a person unknown, nobody in the
room was surprised.

And nobody was blind to the fact that the freeing of Eugene Russell
seriously questioned the innocence of Berne Webster.

IX

THE BREAKING DOWN OF WEBSTER

Hastings, sprawling comfortably in a low chair by the south window in
the music room, stopped his whittling when Berne Webster came in with
Judge Wilton. "Meddlesome Mike!" thought the detective. "I sent for
Webster."

"Berne asked me to come with him," the judge explained his presence at
once. "We've talked things over; he thought I might help him bring out
every detail--jog his memory, if necessary."

Hastings did not protest the arrangement. He saw, almost immediately,
that Webster had come with no intention of giving him hearty
cooperation. The motive for this lack of frankness he could not
determine. It was enough that he felt the younger man's veiled
antagonism and appreciated the fact that Wilton accompanied him in the
role of protector.

"If I'm to get anything worth while out of this talk," he decided, "I've
got to mix up my delivery, shuffle the cards, spring first one thing and
then another at him--bewilder him."

He proceeded with that definite design: at an opportune time, he would
guide the narrative, take it out of Webster's hands, and find out what
he wanted to know, not merely what the young lawyer wanted to tell. He
recognized the necessity of breaking down the shell of self-control that
overlaid the suspected man's uneasiness.

That it was only a shell, he felt sure. Webster, leaning an elbow
lightly on the piano, looked down at him out of anxious eyes, and
continually passed his right hand over his smooth, dark-brown hair from
forehead to crown, a mechanical gesture of his when perplexed.

His smile, too, was forced, hardly more than a slight, fixed twist of
the lips, as if he strove to advertise his ability to laugh at danger.
His customary dash, a pleasing levity of manner, was gone, giving place
to a suggestion of strain, so that he seemed always on the alert against
himself, determined to edit in advance his answer to every question.

Wilton had chosen a chair which placed him directly opposite Hastings
and at the same time enabled him to watch Webster. He was smoking a
cigar, and, through the haze that floated up just then from his