r on his left.

A key had always been visible, in old times, by the handle--a key about
which Guest had bantered his friend and cut jokes in which the
spirit-stand and Mrs Brade's name were brought into contact. But there
was no key there now, and he recalled how Stratton had endeavoured to
keep him away from that door. A trifle then, but looking singularly
suggestive now.

A dozen little facts began to grow and spread into horrors, all pointing
to the cause of Stratton's sudden change, and strengthening Guest's
ideas that there must have been a quarrel on the morning appointed for
the wedding, possibly connected with money matters, and then in a fit of
rage and excitement--disappointment, perhaps, at not willingly receiving
the help he had anticipated--a blow had been struck, one that
unintentionally had proved fatal.

All Guest's ideas set in this direction, and once started everything
fitted in exactly, so that at last he felt perfectly convinced that his
friend had killed Brettison and in some way disposed of the body.

For a moment he was disposed to cast the ideas out as utterly absurd and
improbable, but the ideas would flow back again; and, try how he would
to find some better solution of the puzzle, there seemed to be only that
one way.

Stratton stood there by the fireplace, pale, haggard, and wrapped in
thought, apparently utterly unconscious of his friend's presence, till
Guest took a step or two forward and rested his hand upon the table.

Here he remained for a few minutes, trying to think out his course. For
he felt now full of a guilty knowledge, and in that knowledge, if he did
not make it known, a sharer--an accomplice--in a murder. For so the law
and the world would judge it. And then there was Edie!

A shiver of dread and misery ran through him as her bright little face
crossed his mind, and he saw that by keeping silence till the
discovery--for that must come--he would be so implicated that he would
share his friend's arrest; and, even if matters did not turn out serious
with him as far as the law was concerned, his position with the
admiral's family would be the same as Stratton's--everything would be at
an end--his love affair like that of the miserable man before him; the
man who now turned to him with a scared, horrified, hunted look in his
eyes, startled by Guest's advance.

It was time to speak, Guest thought, but the words would not come at
first, and he could only gaze wildly a