, gave to her unusual beauty now an added suggestion
of dignity.

Profoundly moved as she was, there was nothing of the distracted or the
inadequate about her. Hastings, who had admired her earlier in the
evening, saw that her poise was far from overthrown. It seemed to him
that she even had considered how to wear with extraordinary effect the
brilliant, vari-coloured kimono draped about her. The only criticism of
her possible was that, perhaps, she seemed a trifle too imperious--but,
for his part, he liked that.

"A thoroughbred!" he catalogued her, mentally.

"You will excuse me, father," she said from the doorway, "but I couldn't
help hearing." She thrust forward her chin. "Oh, I had to hear!--And
there's something I have to tell."

Her glance went at last from Sloane to Hastings as she advanced slowly
into the room.

The detective pushed forward a chair for her.

"That's fine, Miss Sloane," he assured her. "I'm sure you're going to
help us."

"It isn't much," she qualified, "but I think it's important."

Still she looked at neither Berne Webster nor Judge Wilton. And only a
man trained as Hastings was to keenness of observation would have seen
the slight but incessant tremour of her fingers and the constant,
convulsive play of the muscles under the light covering of her black
silk slippers.

Sloane, alone, had remained seated. She was looking up to Hastings, who
stood several feet in front of Webster and the judge.

"I had gone to sleep," she said, her voice low, but musical and clear.
"I waked up when I heard father moving about--his room is directly under
mine; and, now that Aunt Lucy is away, I'm always more or less anxious
about him. And I knew he had got quiet earlier, gone to sleep. It wasn't
like him to be awake again so soon.

"I sprang out of bed, really very quickly. I listened for a few seconds,
but there was no further sound in father's room. The night was unusually
quiet. There wasn't a sound--at first. Then I heard something. It was
like somebody running, running very fast, outside, on the grass."

She paused. Hastings was struck by her air of alertness, or of prepared
waiting, of readiness for questions.

"Which way did the footsteps go?" he asked.

"From the house--down the slope, toward the little gate that opens on
the road."

"Then what?"

"I wondered idly what it meant, but it made no serious impression on me.
I listened again for sounds in father's room. There was none. Stru