impatient, always complaining.
She was totally without any appreciation of all that Mrs. Withers did
for her. Nobody likes Miss Fulton particularly. I think all of us, as we
came to know the two, were amazed that Mrs. Withers could have such a
disagreeable sister."

Mrs. Allen's recital, while interesting and valuable as to Mrs. Withers'
acknowledgment that she felt compelled to keep secret some part of her
life, threw no practical light on the situation.

Bristow was silent, thoughtful, for a few moments.

"I've never seen Miss Fulton, except for the glance I had at her this
morning," he said. "Was it possible for anybody to mistake one for the
other? I mean this: if a man had known that last night Miss Fulton was up
and dressed, could it have been possible for him, in a dim light and
under the stress of terrific agitation, to have attacked Mrs. Withers
under the impression that he was attacking Miss Fulton?"

"Oh, no!" Mrs. Allen said emphatically, and then added: "Oh, I see what
you mean. Well, they were of about the same build, although Mrs. Withers
wasn't so thin as Miss Fulton is. Then, their hair is different, Mrs.
Withers' black, Miss Fulton's blond. I don't know. I should say it all
depended on how dark it was."

When Mrs. Allen had gone, Bristow took from a bookcase one of his
scrapbooks and went to work pasting into place the clippings he had been
reading that morning when interrupted by the cry of murder.

For nine years he had been studying murder cases and the methods of
murderers. People had laughed at his fad, but now he was more pleased
with himself as a result of it than ever before. He was still pleasantly
aware of the prominence he would enjoy in Furmville because of
Greenleaf's having called on him for assistance.

"Every murderer," he had said many times, "makes some mistake, big or
little, which will lead to his destruction if the authorities have brains
enough to find it."

He thought the rule might apply too widely to this case. In fact, his own
trouble now was that too many mistakes had been made, too many clues had
been left lying around. In order to determine the guilty person, much
chaff would have to be sifted from the wheat of truth.

He was closing his scrapbook when the chief of police arrived a few
minutes before five o'clock.

"Henry Morley," Greenleaf announced at once, "is a receiving teller in a
bank in Washington--the Anderson National Bank."

"And receiving tellers,"