ld have
happened."

Luttrell, though he had been a listener and nothing else throughout
Martin's statement, had cherished a hope that somehow it might be
discovered that Stella had died by an accident. That she should die by
her own hand, in this house, under the same roof as Joan, and because of
one year which had ended at Stockholm--oh, to him a generation
back!--was an idea of irrepressible horror. He could not shake off some
sense of guiltiness. He had argued with it all that day, discovering the
most excellent contentions, but at the end, not one of them had
succeeded in weakening in the least degree his inward conviction that he
had his share in Stella's death. Unless her death was an accident,
unless, using her drug, she fell asleep and so drifted unintentionally
out of life! He still caught at that hope.

"Are you sure that the handwriting was Stella's?" he asked.

"Quite. I saw the letter."

"Did the editor give it to you?"

"No, he had to keep it for his own protection."

"That's a pity," said Harry. A pity--or a relief, since, without that
evidence before his eyes, he could still insist upon his pretence.

"Not such a great pity," answered Martin, and taking a letter from his
pocket he threw it down upon the table, with the ghost of a smile upon
his face. "What do you think I have been doing during the last two
years?" he asked drily.

Harry pounced upon the letter and his first glance dispelled his
illusion--nay, proved to him that he had never had faith in it. For he
saw, without surprise, the broad strokes and the straight up-and-down
letters familiar to him of old. Stella had always written rather like a
man, a man without character. He had made a joke of it to her in the
time before the little jokes aimed by the one at the other had begun to
rasp.

"Yes, she wrote the letter and signed it with Sir Chichester's name."

Millie Splay reached out for the letter.

"Stella took a big risk," she said. "I don't understand it. She must
have foreseen that Chichester's hand was likely to be familiar in the
office."

"No, Millie," said Sir Chichester suddenly, and he spurred his memory.
"Of course! Of course! Stella helped me with the telephone one day this
week in the library there. I told her that I was new to the _Harpoon_."
He suddenly beat upon the table with his fist. "But why should she write
the letter at all? Why should she want her death here, under these
strange conditions, announced to th