w. "If there had been a light in that
window, any one leaving this house by the rear would have seen it,
unless he had been drunk or a fool," muttered Sweetwater, in
contemptuous comment to himself. "Arthur Cumberland's story is one lie.
I'll take the district attorney's suggestion and return to New York
to-night. My work's done here."

Yet he hung about the links for a long time, and finally ended by
entering the house, and taking up his stand beneath the long, narrow
window of the closet overlooking the golf-links. With chin resting on his
arms, he stared out over the sill and sought from the space before him,
and from the intricacies of his own mind, the hint he lacked to make this
present solution of the case satisfactory to all his instincts.

"Something is lacking." Thus he blurted out after a look behind him into
the adjoining room of death. "I can't say what; nor can I explain my own
unrest, or my disinclination to leave this spot. The district attorney
is satisfied, and so, I'm afraid is the coroner; but I'm not, and I feel
as guilty--"

Here he threw open the window for air, and, thrusting his head out,
glanced over the links, then aside at the pines, showing beyond the line
of the house on the southern end, and then out of mere idleness, down at
the ground beneath him. "As guilty," he went on, "as Ranelagh appears to
be, and some one really is. I--"

Starting, he leaned farther out. What was that he saw in the vines--not
on the snow of the ground, but half way up in the tangle of small
branches clinging close to the stone of the lower story, just beneath
this window? He would see. Something that glistened, something that could
only have got there by falling from this window. Could he reach it? No;
he would have to climb up from below to do that. Well, that was easy
enough. With the thought, he rushed from the room. In another minute he
was beneath that window; had climbed, pulled, pushed his way up; had
found the little pocket of netted vines observable from above; had thrust
in his fingers and worked a small object out; had looked at it, uttered
an exclamation curious in its mixture of suppressed emotions, and let
himself down again into the midst of the two or three men who had scented
the adventure and hastened to be witnesses of its outcome.

"A phial!" he exclaimed, "An empty phial, but--" Holding the little
bottle up between his thumb and forefinger, he turned it slowly about
until the label faced