emained
unchanged, too much so, it seems; for when his eye finally rose to my
face, he found there what made him recoil and turn with something like
fierceness on his companion.

"You have been talking to her," he vehemently protested. "Perhaps you
have gone further than that. What has happened here? I think I ought to
know. She is so guileless, Inspector Dalzell; so perfectly free from all
connection with this crime. Why have you shut her up here, and plied her
with questions, and made her look at me with such an expression, when
all you have against me is just what you have against some half-dozen
others,--that I was weak enough, or unfortunate enough, to spend a few
minutes with that unhappy woman in the alcove before she died?"

"It might be well if Miss Van Arsdale herself would answer you," was the
inspector's quiet retort. "What you have said may constitute all that we
have against you, but it is not all we have against her."

I gasped, not so much at this seeming accusation, the motive of which
I believed myself to understand, but at the burning blush with which it
was received by Mr. Durand.

"What do you mean?" he demanded, with certain odd breaks in his voice.
"What can you have against her?"

"A triviality," returned the inspector, with a look in my direction that
was, I felt, not to be mistaken.

"I do not call it a triviality," I burst out. "It seems that Mrs.
Fairbrother, for all her elaborate toilet, was found without gloves on
her arms. As she certainly wore them on entering the alcove, the police
have naturally been looking for them. And where do you think they have
found them? Not in the alcove with her, not in the possession of the man
who undoubtedly carried them away with him, but--"

"I know, I know," Mr. Durand hoarsely put in. "You need not say any
more. Oh, my poor Rita! what have I brought upon you by my weakness?"

"Weakness!"

He started; I started; my voice was totally unrecognizable.

"I should give it another name," I added coldly.

For a moment he seemed to lose heart, then he lifted his head again,
and looked as handsome as when he pleaded for my hand in the little
conservatory.

"You have that right," said he; "besides, weakness at such a time, and
under such an exigency, is little short of wrong. It was unmanly in me
to endeavor to secrete these gloves; more than unmanly for me to choose
for their hiding-place the recesses of an article belonging exclusively
to yourself