ble precursor of a still more miserable
night, I decided to drop conjecture and await the enlightenment which
must come with the morrow.

It was, therefore, in a condition of mingled dread and expectation that I
opened the paper which was brought me the next morning. Of the shock
which it gave me to see my own name blotting the page with suggestions of
hideous crime, I will not speak, but pass at once to the few gleams of
added knowledge I was able to gather from those abominable columns.
Arthur, the good-for-nothing brother, had returned from his wild carouse
and had taken affairs in charge with something like spirit and a decent
show of repentance for his own shortcomings and the mad taste for liquor
which had led him away from home that night. Carmel was still ill, and
likely to be so for many days to come. Her case was diagnosed as one of
brain fever and of a most dangerous type. Doctors and nurses were busy at
her bedside and little hope was held out of her being able to tell soon,
if ever, what she knew of her sister's departure from the house on that
fatal evening. That her testimony on this point would be invaluable was
self-evident, for proofs were plenty of her having haunted her sister's
rooms all the evening in a condition of more or less delirium. She was
alone in the house and this may have added to her anxieties, all of the
servants having gone to the policemen's ball. It was on their return in
the early morning hours that she had been discovered, lying ill and
injured before her sister's fireplace.

One fact was mentioned which set me thinking. The keys of the club-house
had been found lying on a table in the side hall of the Cumberland
mansion--the keys which I have already mentioned as missing from my
pocket. An alarming discovery which might have acted as a clew to the
suspicious I feared, if their presence there had not been explained by
the waitress who had cleared the table after dinner. Coming upon these
keys lying on the floor beside one of the chairs, she had carried them
out into the hall and laid them where they would be more readily seen.
She had not recognised the keys, but had taken it for granted that they
belonged to Mr. Ranelagh who had dined at the house that night.

They were my keys, and I have already related how I came to drop them on
the floor. Had they but stayed there! Adelaide, or was it Carmel, might
not have seen them and been led by some strange, if not tragic, purpose,
inc