ng. His haste in emerging from the room,
when the colored girl saw him later, and his pause to listen at the head
of the stairs seem to indicate that something had attracted his
attention below."

"Have you any idea what that was?" asked Scanlon.

"I am not yet sure. But this is how it builds up in my mind. When he
reentered the sitting-room he found his father dead and his sister in a
faint. Having, of course, a full knowledge of certain nervous seizures
to which his sister was subject, it rushed upon him that, in a moment of
frenzy, she had killed her father."

"No!" cried Nora Cavanaugh. "Oh, no!"

"He's only supposing," said Scanlon, soothingly. "That's nothing at
all."

"The young man's brain is a quick one," proceeded Ashton-Kirk; "any one
who follows his work in the _Standard_ knows that. He at once began to
cast about, so it seems to me, for a way of concealing his sister's
guilt. He took her to her room, and came down once more to the
sitting-room. Allowing for a proper passage of time, he then asked the
nurse to call in the police. To them he told the story which he
afterward repeated to the coroner's physician: that his father had met
his death in the space which had elapsed between his taking his sister
to her room and his return to the sitting-room."

Bat looked at Nora; in the semi-dark of the car her face was drawn and
despairing. There was not a ray of hope in Scanlon's own breast, and
patiently he listened as the quiet voice of the investigator went on:

"The by-play between the young man and the girl, during their
examination by Dr. Shower, which you reported so graphically to me, took
my attention. He must have seen suspicion heading his way, and yet he
took no real steps to prevent it. And then there was something else. You
reported that he had appeared in the sitting-room after you had gone
there with Osborne and Dr. Shower to examine the body; and his anxiety
then concerning the nature of the instrument used in the commission of
the crime struck me as being a bit unusual. He seemed to dread,
apparently, that this would be shown to be something caught up on the
spur of the moment, something belonging in the room. Without putting it
in so many words, he seemed to insinuate that a regulation weapon, such
as might have been brought into the house by an unknown, had been used.
In this I seemed to detect not only a desire to throw the police off the
track, but also the existence of an element of