ce, but by the conviction that Durbin, whose
present sleek complacency was more offensive to me than the sneering
superiority of a week ago, believed her to be a guilty woman, and as
such his rightful prey. This alone would have influenced me to take
the opposite view; for we never ran along together, and in a case
where any division of opinion was possible, always found ourselves,
consciously or unconsciously, on different sides. Yet I did not
really dislike Durbin, who is a very fine fellow. I only hated his
success and the favor which rewarded it.

I know that I have some very nasty failings and I do not shrink from
owning them. My desire is to represent myself as I am, and I must
admit that it was not entirely owing to disinterested motives that
I now took the secret stand I did in Miss Tuttle's favor. To prove
her innocent whom once I considered the cause of, if not the guilty
accessory to her sister's murder, now became my dream by night and
my occupation by day. Though I seemed to have no sympathizer in
this effort and though the case against her was being pushed very
openly in the district attorney's office, yet I clung to my
convictions with an almost insensate persistence, inwardly declaring
her the victim of circumstances, and hoping against hope that some
clue would offer itself by means of which I might yet prove her so.
But where was I to seek for this clue?

Alas, no ready answer to this very important query was forthcoming.
All possible evidence in this case seemed to have been exhausted save
such as Mr. Jeffrey and Miss Tuttle withheld. And so the monstrous
accusation stood, and before it all Washington--my humble self
included--stood in a daze of mingled doubt and compassion, hunting
for explanations which failed to appear and seeking in vain for
some guiltier party, who evermore slipped from under our hand. Had
Mr. Jeffrey's alibi been less complete he could not have stood up
against the suspicions which now ran riot. But there was no
possibility of shifting the actual crime back to him after the
testimony of so frank and trustworthy a man as Tallman. If the
stopping of Mrs. Jeffrey's watch fixed the moment of her death as
accurately as was supposed,--and I never heard the least doubt
thrown out in this regard,--he could not by any means of transit
then known in Washington have reached Waverley Avenue in time to
fire that shot. The gates of the cemetery were closed at sundown;
sundown to