al hand, I mean."

"And what makes you so sure of this?"

"And what makes you so sure of the contrary? It is for you to prove, not
for me to prove her innocence."

"Ah," said Mr. Gryce, in his slow, sarcastic way, "you recollect that
principle of law, do you? If I remember rightly, you have not always
been so punctilious in regarding it, or wishing to have it regarded,
when the question was whether Mr. Clavering was the assassin or not."

"But he is a man. It does not seem so dreadful to accuse a man of a
crime. But a woman! and such a woman! I cannot listen to it; it is
horrible. Nothing short of absolute confession on her part will ever
make me believe Mary Leavenworth, or any other woman, committed this
deed. It was too cruel, too deliberate, too----"

"Read the criminal records," broke in Mr. Gryce.

But I was obstinate. "I do not care for the criminal records. All the
criminal records in the world would never make me believe Eleanore
perpetrated this crime, nor will I be less generous towards her cousin
Mary Leavenworth is a faulty woman, but not a guilty one."

"You are more lenient in your judgment of her than her cousin was, it
appears."

"I do not understand you," I muttered, feeling a new and yet more
fearful light breaking upon me.

"What! have you forgotten, in the hurry of these late events, the
sentence of accusation which we overheard uttered between these ladies
on the morning of the inquest?"

"No, but----"

"You believed it to have been spoken by Mary to Eleanore?"

"Of course; didn't you?"

Oh, the smile which crossed Mr. Gryce's face! "Scarcely. I left that
baby-play for you. I thought one was enough to follow on that tack."

The light, the light that was breaking upon me! "And do you mean to say
it was Eleanore who was speaking at that time? That I have been laboring
all these weeks under a terrible mistake, and that you could have
righted me with a word, and did not?"

"Well, as to that, I had a purpose in letting you follow your own lead
for a while. In the first place, I was not sure myself which spoke;
though I had but little doubt about the matter. The voices are, as you
must have noticed, very much alike, while the attitudes in which we
found them upon entering were such as to be explainable equally by the
supposition that Mary was in the act of launching a denunciation, or in
that of repelling one. So that, while I did not hesitate myself as to
the true explanation of the s