her?"

"No. There wasn't time for any explanation--specially."

"But you do know her?"

"I told you that, sir, outside--just now."

"All right. Who is she?" Hastings put that query carelessly, in a way
which might have meant that he had heard the most important part of the
young lawyer's story. That impression was heightened by his beginning
again to pace the floor.

"Her name's Mildred Brace," replied Webster, moistening his lips with
his tongue. "She was my stenographer for eight months."

The detective drew up sharply.

"When?"

"Until two weeks ago."

"She resign?"

"Yes. No--I discharged her."

"What for?"

"Incompetence."

"I don't understand that exactly. You mean you employed her eight months
although she was incompetent?"

"That's pretty bald," Webster objected. "Her incompetence came, rather,
from temperament. She was, toward the last, too nervous, excitable. She
was more trouble than she was worth."

"Ah, that's different," Hastings said, with a significance that was
clear. "People might have thought," he elaborated, "if you had fired her
for other reasons, this tragedy tonight would have put you in an
unenviable position--to say the least."

He had given words to the vague feeling which had depressed them all,
ever since the discovery of the murder; that here was something vastly
greater than the accidental finding of a person killed by an outsider,
that the crime touched Sloanehurst personally. The foreboding had been
patent--almost, it seemed, a tangible thing--but, until this moment,
each had steered clear of it, in speech.

Webster's response was bitter.

"They'll want to say it anyway, I guess." To that he added, in frank
resentment: "And I might as well enter a denial here: I had nothing to
do with the--this whole lamentable affair!"

The silence in which he and Hastings regarded each other was broken by
Arthur Sloane's querulous words:

"Why--why, in the name of all the inscrutable saints, this thing should
have happened at Sloanehurst, is more than I can say! Jumping angels!
Now, let me tell you what I----"

He stopped, hearing light footfalls coming down the hall. There was the
swish of silk, a little outcry half-repressed, and Lucille Sloane stood
in the doorway. One hand was at her breast, the other against the
door-frame, to steady her tall, slightly swaying figure. Her hair, a
pyramid on her head, as if the black, heavy masses of it had been done
by hurrying fingers