ey had told me, but I
managed to murmur some polite incredulity.

"Oh, it was true," she went on bitterly. "I knew he had grown away
from me, but I never suspected that--that he could be so vulgar!"
That, of course, was the way in which it would appeal to her--as
vulgar.

"It is that which is worrying him now," she added.

"You mean--"

"No matter. He shall have the money to-night, and that will be ended.
Let me go on with my story. As I said, I began to use this room. I
kept my papers in the desk yonder, and worked there regularly every
day. But one morning, when I came in, I noticed something unusual--an
odor of tobacco. You know Mr. Magnus was a great smoker."

"Yes," I said.

"You may have noticed that he always smoked a heavy black cigar which
he had made for him especially in Cuba. It had a quite distinctive
odor."

"Yes," I said again. I had noticed more than once the sweet, heavy
aroma of Magnus' cigars.

"I recognized the odor at once," went on Mrs. Magnus. "It was from one
of his cigars. When I opened the desk, I found a little heap of ashes
on his ash tray, which I had been using to keep pins in, and the
remnant of the cigar he had been smoking."

"He?" I repeated. "But why should you think--"

"Wait," she interrupted, "till you hear the rest. I cleaned off the
tray and went through my day's work as usual. The next morning I found
the same thing--and something more. Some one had been trying to write
on the pad of paper on the desk."

"_Trying to write_?" I echoed.

"Yes, trying--as though some force were holding him back."

She went over to the desk, unlocked a little drawer, and took out
several sheets of paper.

"Here is what I found that morning," she said, and handed me a sheet
from an ordinary writing pad.

I saw scrawled across it an indecipherable jumble of words. She had
expressed it exactly--it seemed as though some one had been trying to
write with a weight clogging his hand. And there was something about
this scrap of paper--something convincing and authentic--which struck
heavily at my skepticism. Here was what a lawyer would call evidence.

"It kept on from day to day," continued Mrs. Magnus, sitting down
again. "Every morning the little heap of ashes and fragment of cigar,
and a scrawl like that--until finally, one morning, I understood what
was happening in this room, for three words were legible."

She handed me another sheet of paper. At the top were the words, "My
dea