s the use of keeping up this idle pretence with me?"

"It is not a pretence--it is the truth, the simple and the absolute
truth!" she replied with heat. "If they were the last words I had to
say in this world, I would repeat on the very threshold of the one to
come: _I was not at Gleer Cottage last night._ I came straight from
Clavering Close to Wuthering Grange, and I never left my room for one
instant from that time until I came down to breakfast this morning.
Ailsa Lorne was with me when I returned; she will tell you that I am
speaking the truth."

Yes, decidedly Ailsa Lorne would tell him; that Cleek acknowledged to
himself. Had she not done so already? But again she might also have told
him that she thought she heard Lady Katharine's bedroom door open in the
night and some one steal out of it. Besides, there was another
thing--the golden capsule of the scent bracelet--to be reckoned with.
Hum-m-m! Was there, then, a possibility that Geoff Clavering was
speaking the truth, and that it was Lady Katharine herself who was
lying? Of course, in that case---- Stop a bit--they were going at it
again, and he could not afford to lose a single word.

"I don't care a hang what Ailsa Lorne or anybody else will say; I know
what I know," young Clavering flung in doggedly. "You can't tell me that
I didn't see a thing when I did see it--at least, you can't and expect
to make me believe it. Give me credit for a little common sense."

"How can I when your own words so utterly refute it, when you convict
yourself out of your own mouth, when even the dead man himself is a
witness to the utter folly of this charge?"

"De Louvisan?"

"Yes. He speaks for me!"

"What nonsense!"

"He speaks for me," she repeated, not noticing the interruption, "and if
you will not believe a living witness, then you must believe a dead one.
Uncle Raynor and Harry said this morning that the Count de Louvisan's
body had been found, not lying on the ground, but lifted up and spiked
to the wall; and you who claim to have seen me in that house last night
claim also to have searched the place and found no one but me present.
Will you tell me, then, how I could possibly have lifted the body of a
man weighing ten or eleven stone at the least computation, much less
have lifted it high enough to spike it to a wall?"

"One for the girl!" commented Cleek silently.

"You might have had help; there might have been somebody there who left
before I arrived," rep