ed rather impatiently until she had nearly reached the door
before he shot his bolt, with a fine assumption of carelessness in the
announcement.

"Garson has confessed!"

Mary, who readily enough had already guessed the essential hypocrisy of
all this play, turned and confronted the Inspector, and answered without
the least trace of fear, but with the firmness of knowledge:

"Oh, no, he hasn't!"

Her attitude exasperated Burke. His voice roared out wrathfully.

"What's the reason he hasn't?"

The music in the tones of the answer was a vocal rebuke.

"Because he didn't do it." She stated the fact as one without a hint of
any contradictory possibility.

"Well, he says he did it!" Burke vociferated, still more loudly.

Mary, in her turn, resorted to a bit of finesse, in order to learn
whether or not Garson had been arrested. She spoke with a trace of
indignation.

"But how could he have done it, when he went----" she began.

The Inspector fell a victim to her superior craft. His question came
eagerly.

"Where did he go?"

Mary smiled for the first time since she had been in the room, and in
that smile the Inspector realized his defeat in the first passage of
this game of intrigue between them.

"You ought to know," she said, sedately, "since you have arrested him,
and he has confessed."

Demarest put up a hand to conceal his smile over the police official's
chagrin. Gilder, staring always at this woman who had come to be his
Nemesis, was marveling over the beauty and verve of the one so hating
him as to plan the ruin of his life and his son's.

Burke was frantic over being worsted thus. To gain a diversion, he
reverted to his familiar bullying tactics. His question burst raspingly.
It was a question that had come to be constant within his brain during
the last few hours, one that obsessed him, that fretted him sorely,
almost beyond endurance.

"Who shot Griggs?" he shouted.

Mary rested serene in the presence of this violence. Her answer capped
the climax of the officer's exasperation.

"My husband shot a burglar," she said, languidly. And then her insolence
reached its culmination in a query of her own: "Was his name Griggs?" It
was done with splendid art, with a splendid mastery of her own emotions,
for, even as she spoke the words, she was remembering those shuddering
seconds when she had stood, only a few hours ago, gazing down at the
inert bulk that had been a man.

Burke betook himself to a