What did they want?"

"It was blackmail. They, too, fancied I was at Stanwick that night. They
knew about the diamonds, though I did not then know how they came by the
information. They thought to frighten me into paying a sum of money. The
tall man's threat was of the police whom he said would be sure to
connect me with the crime. But I laughed at him, and dared him to do
anything he had in mind. The old man, I think, would have threatened my
life. I had heard some of his talk in the next room; that is why I took
up the revolver from the table; and when I listened at the wall it was
to hear what more he might say."

"They keep your house under watch," said Scanlon.

"I know; I see them loitering in the street almost constantly. And they
write me threatening letters. But I've never been afraid of them until
last night. After you had gone--oh, please, Bat, forgive me for keeping
it from you, when you were so worried for my sake and so good to me--but
I went to Stanwick; I felt that I had to--there was something I must
know.

"These men followed me, Bat; I did not know it until I had left the
house after my visit. Then the old man came up to me in the dark. He
drew out a knife; I saw it quite plainly somehow; and then some one
seized him, and----" She stopped and looked at the big athlete intently;
the expression upon his face was one not to be mistaken. "It was you,"
she said. "Bat, it was you."

He told her how he came to be there and also of what he saw
afterward--of how Mary Burton went so strangely through the house, and
of the words of the old man who scouted the idea of the girl being ill,
and who had protested he had seen her leave the house more than once
since the crime in a sort of disguise. As Nora listened to this, her
face grew rigid with apprehension.

"When you returned from your first visit to Stanwick," she said, after
he had finished, "and told me of the way young Frank Burton acted and
spoke while being examined by the police, an idea came into my mind
which I at once put away from me. I knew Mary Burton, because of her
illness, had moments in which she was not quite herself. Suppose it were
not Frank after all who did the thing I so feared--suppose it were she?"

"Ah!" said Scanlon. "_You_ got that, too, did you?"

"But I refused to consider it. The idea of Frank was bad enough, but
that of Mary was so much worse that I could not bear it. But when the
papers came out saying that a woman was s