all) was this:

"She has some feeling, then! Her terror and remorse have maddened her. I
can dwell upon her image with pity." The next, "Will they find her wet
clothes and discover that she was out last night?" The latter possibility
troubled me. My mind was the seat of strange contradictions.

As the day advanced and I began to realise that I, Elwood Ranelagh,
easy-going man of the world, but with traditions of respectable living on
both sides of my house and a list of friends of which any man might be
proud, was in a place of detention on the awful charge of murder, I found
that my keenest torment arose from the fact that I was shut off from the
instant knowledge of what was going on in the house where all my
thoughts, my fears, and shall I say it, latent hopes were centred. To
know Carmel ill and not to know how ill! To feel the threatening arm of
the law hovering constantly over her head and neither to know the instant
of its fall nor be given the least opportunity to divert it. To realise
that some small inadvertance on her part, some trivial but incriminating
object left about, some heedless murmur or burst of unconscious frenzy
might precipitate her doom, and I remain powerless, bearing my share of
suspicion and ignominy, it is true, but not the chief share if matters
befell as I have suggested, which they were liable to do at any hour,
nay, at any minute.

My examination before the magistrate held one element of comfort.
Nothing in its whole tenor went to show that, as yet, she was in the
least suspected of any participation in my so-called crime. But the
knowledge which came later, of how the police first learned of trouble
at the club-house did not add to this sense of relief, whatever
satisfaction it gave my curiosity. A cry of distress had come to them
over the telephone; a wild cry, in a woman's choked and tremulous voice:
"Help at The Whispering Pines! Help!" That was all, or all they revealed
to me. In their endeavour to find out whether or not I was present when
this call was made, I learned the nature of their own suspicions. They
believed that Adelaide in some moment of prevision had managed to reach
the telephone and send out this message. But what did I believe? What
could I believe? All the incidents of the deadly struggle which must
have preceded the fatal culminating act, were mysteries which my mind
refused to penetrate. After hours of torturing uncertainty, and an
evening which was the misera