o. 5, Manniston Road, Maria Fulton lay awake a
long time and tortured herself by reviewing again and again the thoughts
that had crushed her during the day. Miss Kelly, on a cot at the foot of
the girl's bed, heard her stirring restlessly but could not know in the
darkness how her long, slender fingers tore at the bed-covering, nor how
her face was drawn with pain.

"The overturning of that chair,"--her mind whirled the events before
her--"the sound of that whisper, that man's whisper, and the sight of
that foot! He wore rubbers. I know he did. He always wears them when it's
even cloudy. It was he! It was he!"

Her nails dug into her palms as she fought for something like
self-control.

"If it was not he? I would never have fainted--never. That's what made me
faint, the sickening, undeniable knowledge that that was who it was. And
I loved him! But--but the rubber-shod foot, the size of it! Am I sure?
Could it have been----"

She groaned so that Miss Kelly lifted her head from her own pillow and
listened intently, trying to determine whether the sufferer was asleep or
awake.

"He's not stupid," she swept on, closing mutinous lips against the
repetition of sound. "He knew Enid could do nothing--nothing more. I
don't understand. Oh, I don't understand! I wonder now why I said I heard
nothing.

"I wonder why I lay unconscious on the floor near the dining room door
all those hours--until ten o'clock this morning. It was because the
knowledge was too much for me to stand--just as it is too much now. And
I can't share it with anybody. I'll never be able to get it off my
conscience. If I did, they'd hang him--or the other one who----"

At that thought, she screamed aloud, a wild, eerie sound that chilled the
blood of even Miss Kelly, accustomed as she was to the cries of suffering
and despair. The nurse was at the hysterical girl's side in a moment,
holding her quivering body in strong, capable arms.

"What was it? What was it, Miss Fulton?" she asked soothingly.

Maria brushed the back of her hand across her forehead, which was beaded
with big, cold drops of perspiration.

"Nothing, Miss Kelly; nothing," she half-moaned. "A bad dream, a
nightmare, I guess. Give me something to make me sleep."

She drank eagerly from a glass the nurse put to her lips.

"If I begin to talk in my sleep, Miss Kelly, call me, wake me up, will
you?" she begged, the fright still in her voice.

"Yes, I will." This reassuringly while Mi