.

I shall spare you the opening details, also much of the preliminary
testimony. Enough that at the close of the sixth day, the outlook was a
serious one for Arthur Cumberland. The prosecution appeared to be making
good its claims. The quiet and unexpectedly dignified way in which, at
the beginning, the defendant had faced the whole antagonistic
court-room, with the simple plea of "Not Guilty," was being slowly but
surely forgotten in the accumulated proofs of his discontented life
under his sister's dominating influence, his desire for independence and
a free use of the money held in trust for him by this sister under their
father's will, the quarrels which such a situation would naturally evoke
between characters cast in such different moulds and actuated by such
opposing tastes and principles, and the final culmination of the same at
the dinner-table when Adelaide forced him, as it were, to subscribe to
her prohibition of all further use of liquor in their house. Following
this evidence of motive, came the still more damaging one of
opportunity. He was shown to have been in the club-house at or near the
time of Adelaide's death. The matter of the bottles was gone into and
the event in Cuthbert Road. Then I was called to the stand, and my
testimony asked for.

I had prepared myself for the ordeal and faced it unflinchingly. That I
might keep intact the one point necessary to Carmel's safety, I met my
inquisitors, now as before, with the utmost candour in all other
respects. Indeed, in one particular I was even more exact in my details
than at any previous examination. Anxious to explain my agitated and
hesitating advance through the club-house, prior to my discovery of the
crime which had been committed there, I acknowledged what I had hitherto
concealed, that in my first entrance into the building, I had come upon a
man's derby hat and coat hanging in the lower hall, and when questioned
more minutely on the subject, allowed it to appear that it was owing to
the disappearance of these articles during my stay upstairs, that I had
been led into saying that some one had driven away from The Whispering
Pines before the coming of the police.

This, as you will see, was in open contradiction of my former statements
that I had _seen_ an unknown party, thus attired, driving away through
the upper gateway just as I entered by the lower. But it was a
contradiction which while noted by Mr. Moffat, failed to injure me with
th