now,
seemed suddenly to have left him. With it went the fire from his eye, the
quiver from his lip, and it is necessary to add, everything else
calculated to awaken sympathy. He was simply sullen now.

"May I ask by which door you left the house?"

"The side door--the one I always take."

"What overcoat did you wear?"

"I don't remember. The first one I came to, I suppose."

"But you can surely tell what hat?"

They expected a violent reply, and they got it.

"No, I can't. What has my hat got to do with the guilt of Elwood
Ranelagh?"

"Nothing, we hope," was the imperturbable answer. "But we find it
necessary to establish absolutely just what overcoat and what hat you
wore down street that night."

"I've told you that I don't remember." The young man's colour was rising.

"Are not these the ones?" queried the district attorney, making a sign to
Sweetwater, who immediately stepped forward, with a shabby old ulster
over his arm, and a battered derby in his hand.

The young man started, rose, then sat again, shouting out with
angry emphasis:

"_No!"_

"Yet you recognise these?"

"Why shouldn't I? They're mine. Only I don't wear them any more. They're
done for. You must have rooted them out from some closet."

"We did; perhaps you can tell us what closet."

"I? No. What do I know about my old clothes? I leave that to the women."

The slight faltering observable in the latter word conveyed nothing to
these men.

"Mr. Cumberland,"--the district attorney was very serious,--"this hat and
this coat, old as they are, were worn into town from your house that
night. This we know, absolutely. We can even trace them to the
club-house."

Mechanically, not spontaneously this time, the young man rose to his
feet, staring first at the man who had uttered these words, then at the
garments which Sweetwater still held in view. No anger now; he was too
deeply shaken for that, too shaken to answer at once--too shaken to be
quite the master of his own faculties. But he rallied after an interval
during which these three men devoured his face, each under his own
special anxiety, and read there possibly what each least wanted to see.

"I don't know anything about it," were the words with which Arthur
Cumberland sought to escape from the net which had been thus deftly cast
about him. "I didn't wear the things. Anybody can tell you what clothes I
came home in. Ranelagh may have borrowed--"

"Ranelagh wore his own coat an