asely wronged." And raising her hands to her ears, she tore
out the diamonds which hung there, and flung them at the feet of the
unfortunate man.

It was the final wrench of the rack. With a yell such as I never thought
to listen to from the lips of a man, he flung up his arms, while all the
lurid light of madness glared on his face. "And I have given my soul to
hell for a shadow!" he moaned, "for a shadow!"

"Well, that is the best day's work I ever did! Your congratulations,
Mr. Raymond, upon the success of the most daring game ever played in a
detective's office."

I looked at the triumphant countenance of Mr. Gryce in amazement. "What
do you mean?" I cried; "did you plan all this?"

"Did I plan it?" he repeated. "Could I stand here, seeing how things
have turned out, if I had not? Mr. Raymond, let us be comfortable. You
are a gentleman, but we can well shake hands over this. I have never
known such a satisfactory conclusion to a bad piece of business in all
my professional career."

We did shake hands, long and fervently, and then I asked him to explain
himself.

"Well," said he, "there has always been one thing that plagued me, even
in the very moment of my strongest suspicion against this woman, and
that was, the pistol-cleaning business. I could not reconcile it with
what I knew of womankind. I could not make it seem the act of a woman.
Did you ever know a woman who cleaned a pistol? No. They can fire them,
and do; but after firing them, they do not clean them. Now it is a
principle which every detective recognizes, that if of a hundred leading
circumstances connected with a crime, ninety-nine of these are acts
pointing to the suspected party with unerring certainty, but the
hundredth equally important act one which that person could not have
performed, the whole fabric of suspicion is destroyed. Recognizing this
principle, then, as I have said, I hesitated when it came to the point
of arrest. The chain was complete; the links were fastened; but one link
was of a different size and material from the rest; and in this argued a
break in the chain. I resolved to give her a final chance. Summoning Mr.
Clavering, and Mr. Harwell, two persons whom I had no reason to suspect,
but who were the only persons beside herself who could have committed
this crime, being the only persons of intellect who were in the house
or believed to be, at the time of the murder, I notified them separately
that the assassin of Mr. Lea