e went to each of these windows and found them locked. Then, a last
time, he bent over Kedsty. He knew that in the final moments of his
life Kedsty had suffered a slow and torturing agony. His twisted face
left the story. And the Inspector of Police was a powerful man. He had
struggled, still partly dazed by the blow. But it had taken strength to
overcome him even then, to hold his head back, to choke life out of him
slowly with the noose of hair. And Kent, now that the significance of
what he saw began to grow upon him more clearly, felt triumphing over
all other things in his soul a slow and mighty joy. It was
inconceivable that with the strength of her own hands and body Marette
Radisson had killed Kedsty. A greater strength than hers had held him
in the death-chair, and a greater strength than hers had choked life
from the Inspector of Police!

He drew slowly out of the room, closing the door noiselessly behind
him. He found that the front door was as Kedsty had left it, unlocked.

Close to that door he stood for a space, scarcely allowing himself to
breathe. He listened, but no sound came down the dimly illumined
stairway.

A new thing was pressing upon him now. It rode over the shock of
tragedy, over the first-roused instincts of the man-hunter,
overwhelming him with the realization of a horror such as had never
confronted him before. It gripped him more fiercely than the mere
killing of Kedsty. His thought was of Marette, of the fate which dawn
and discovery would bring for her. His hands clenched and his jaws
tightened. The world was against him, and tomorrow it would be against
her. Only he, in the face of all that condemning evidence in the room
beyond, would disbelieve her guilty of Kedsty's death. And he, Jim
Kent, was already a murderer in the eyes of the law.

He felt within him the slow-growing inspiration of a new spirit, the
gathering might of a new force. A few hours ago he was an outcast. He
was condemned. Life, for him, had been robbed of its last hope. And in
that hour of his grimmest despair Marette Radisson had come to him.
Through storm that had rocked the earth under her feet and set ablaze
the chaotic blackness of the sky over her head she had struggled--for
him. She had counted no cost. She had measured no chances. She had
simply come--_because she believed in him_. And now, upstairs, she was
the victim of the terrible price that was the first cost of his
freedom. For he believed, now that