ren and safe at home as
soon as she could--she'd never have ordered Walters to drive to 981 East
End avenue!"

Carroll did not answer. There was no answer possible. Leverage's logic
was irrefutable. And finally Carroll rose to his feet and slipped into
his heavy overcoat. Leverage's eyes were turned kindly upon him.

"Where are you going, David!"

"I'm going to play my last trump. If it doesn't uncover something--I
throw up my hands. Laugh at me if you will, Eric--rail at me for being
chicken-hearted, for playing hunches too strongly--but I have an idea
that Mrs. Lawrence did not kill Warren. Don't ask me how or why? I don't
know--I admit that frankly. But I've always banked on my knowledge of
human nature, Leverage--and my instinct has never yet betrayed me. Just
now it is forcing me to give this woman every chance in the world to
clear herself. I am hoping that circumstances will allow me to bring this
case to a conclusion without making public her connection with it--the
elopement she was planning."

"You do believe that part of the story, then: that she was going to elope
with Warren?"

"I do. I don't want to--but I'm honest with myself."

"Then," exclaimed Leverage with a slight touch of exasperation in
his manner--"who in thunder could have killed Warren if she didn't?
And when?"

"That," said Carroll simply, "is what I hope to find out."

"From where?"

"From the lips of Mrs. Lawrence. I'm going to have a talk with her."

Carroll was far from happy during his drive to the Lawrence home. The
Warren mystery seemed to be verging on a solution, but in Carroll's
breast there was none of the pardonable surge of elation which normally
was his under these circumstances. It had been a peculiar case from the
first. The _dramatis personae_ had all been of the better type, with the
single exception of William Barker--they had been persons against whom
the detective was loath to believe ill. And, most eagerly, he had shied
from the belief that Mrs. Lawrence was connected in a sinister way with
the death of Roland Warren.

Yet he found himself en-route to her home, facing the ordeal of an
interview with her--an ordeal for her as well as for him--and one through
which he feared she could not safely come. For, frankly as Carroll had
admitted to his friend that he hoped to find Naomi innocent--he was yet
honest and fearless, and failure of the woman to clear herself meant her
arrest. Carroll was determined upon that