ying in the next breath: "You forget that the stone
has a setting. Would you claim that this gentleman of family, place and
political distinction had planned this hideous crime with sufficient
premeditation to have provided himself with the exact counterpart of a
brooch which it is highly improbable he ever saw? You would make him out
a Cagliostro or something worse. Miss Van Arsdale, I fear your theory
will topple over of its own weight."

He was very patient with me; he did not show me the door.

"Yet such a substitution took place, and took place that evening," I
insisted. "The bit of paste shown us at the inquest was never the gem
Mrs. Fairbrother wore on entering the alcove. Besides, where all is
sensation, why cavil at one more improbability? Mr. Grey may have come
over to America for no other reason. He is known as a collector, and
when a man has a passion for diamond-getting--"

"He is known as a collector?"

"In his own country."

"I was not told that."

"Nor I. But I found it out."

"How, my dear child, how?"

"By a cablegram or so."

"You--cabled--his name--to England?"

"No, Inspector; uncle has a code, and I made use of it to ask a friend
in London for a list of the most noted diamond fanciers in the country.
Mr. Grey's name was third on the list."

He gave me a look in which admiration was strangely blended with doubt
and apprehension.

"You are making a brave struggle," said he, "but it is a hopeless one."

"I have one more confidence to repose in you. The nurse who has charge
of Miss Grey was in my class in the hospital. We love each other, and
to her I dared appeal on one point. Inspector--" here my voice
unconsciously fell as he impetuously drew nearer--"a note was sent from
that sick chamber on the night of the ball,--a note surreptitiously
written by Miss Grey, while the nurse was in an adjoining room. The
messenger was Mr. Grey's valet, and its destination the house in which
her father was enjoying his position as chief guest. She says that it
was meant for him, but I have dared to think that the valet would tell
a different story. My friend did not see what her patient wrote, but she
acknowledged that if her patient wrote more than two words the result
must have been an unintelligible scrawl, since she was too weak to hold
a pencil firmly, and so nearly blind that she would have had to feel her
way over the paper."

The inspector started, and, rising hastily, went to his desk, fro