,
and passed through the door.

After that he heard her going unsteadily up the stairs.

CHAPTER XVIII

Kent did not move. His senses for a space were stunned. He was almost
physically insensible to all emotions but that one of shock and horror.
He was staring at Kedsty's gray-white, twisted face when he heard
Marette's door close. A cry came from his lips, but he did not hear
it--was unconscious that he had made a sound. His body shook with a
sudden tremor. He could not disbelieve, for the evidence was there.
From behind, as he had sat in his chair Marette Radisson had struck the
Inspector of Police with some blunt object. The blow had stunned him.
And after that--

He drew a hand across his eyes, as if to clear his vision. What he had
seen was impossible. The evidence was impossible. Assaulted, in deadly
peril, defending either honor or love, Marette Radisson was of the
blood to kill. But to creep up behind her victim--it was inconceivable!
Yet there had been no struggle. Even the automatic on the floor gave no
evidence of that. Kent picked it up. He looked at it closely, and again
the unconscious cry of despair came in a half groan from his lips. For
on the butt of the Colt was a stain of blood and a few gray hairs.
Kedsty had been stunned by a blow from his own gun!

As Kent placed it on the table, his eyes caught suddenly a gleam of
steel under the edge of a newspaper, and he drew out from their
hiding-place the long-bladed clipping scissors which Kedsty had used in
the preparation of his scrap-books and official reports. It was the
last link in the deadly evidence--the automatic with its telltale
stain, the scissors, the tress of hair, and Marette Radisson. He felt a
sensation of sudden dizziness. Every nerve-center in his body had
received its shock, and when the shock had passed it left him sweating.

Swiftly the reaction came. It was a lie, he told himself. The evidence
was false. Marette could not have committed that crime, as the crime
had visualized itself before his eyes. There was something which he had
not seen, something which he could not see, something that was hiding
itself from him. He became, in an instant, the old James Kent. The
instinctive processes of the man-hunter leaped to their stations like
trained soldiers. He saw Marette again, as she had looked at him when
he entered the room. It was not murder he had caught in her wide-open
eyes. It was not hatred. It was not madness. It