s there not some one to understand? Adelaide--" here
her head fell till her face was lost to sight--"had--a--lover--"

"Yes. Mr. Elwood Ranelagh. He was the first to be arrested for the
crime."

The soul in Carmel seemed to vanish at this word. The eyes, which had
been so far-seeing the moment before, grew blank, and the lithe young
body stiff with that death in life which is almost worse to look upon
than death itself. She did not speak; but presently she arose, as an
automaton might arise at the touch of some invisible spring, and so
stood, staring, until the nurse, frightened at the result of her words
and the complete overthrow which might follow them, sprang for a
newspaper and thrust it into her patient's unwilling hand.

Was it too late? For a minute it seemed to be so; then the stony eyes
softened and fell, the rigidity of her frame relaxed, and Carmel sank
back again on the sofa and tried to read the headlines on the open sheet
before her. But her eyes were unequal to the task. With a sob she dropped
the paper and entreated the nurse to relate to her from her own
knowledge, all that had passed, sparing her nothing that would make the
situation perfectly clear to one who had been asleep during the worst
crisis of her life.

Miss Unwin complied, but with reservations. She told of Adelaide having
been found dead at The Whispering Pines by the police, whom she had
evidently summoned during a moment of struggle or fear; of Ranelagh's
presence there, and of the suspicions to which it gave rise; of his
denial of the crime; of his strange reticence on certain points, which
served to keep him incarcerated till a New York detective got to work and
found so much evidence against her brother that Mr. Ranelagh was
subsequently released and Arthur Cumberland indicted. But she said
nothing about the marks on Adelaide's throat, or of the special reason
which the police had for arresting Mr. Ranelagh. She did not dare.
Strangulation was a horrible death to contemplate; and if this factor in
the crime--she was not deceived by Carmel's exclamation that there had
been no murder--was unknown as yet to her patient, as it must be from
what she had said, and the absolute impossibility, as she thought, of her
having known what went on in The Whispering Pines, then it had better
remain unknown to her until circumstances forced it on her knowledge, or
she had gotten sufficient strength to bear it.

Carmel received the account well.