ok place that night at one minute past seven, and the
distance into town is considerable. His alibi could not be gainsaid.
So his name failed to be publicly broached in connection with the
shooting, though his influence over Miss Tuttle could not be
forgotten, suggesting to some that she had acted as his hand in the
deed which robbed him of an undesirable wife. But this I would not
believe. I preferred to accept the statement that she had stopped
short of the library door in her suspicious visit there, and that
the ribbon-tying, which went for so much, had been done at home.
That these facts, especially the latter, called for more than common
credulity, I was quite ready to acknowledge; and had her feeling for
Francis Jeffrey shown less unselfishness, I should certainly have
joined my fellows in regarding these assertions as very lame attempts
to explain what could only be explained by a confession of guilt.

So here was a tangle without a frayed end to pull at, unless the
impervious egotism of Uncle David afforded one, which I doubted. For
how could any man with a frightful secret in his breast show that
unmixed delight in his new equipage and suddenly acquired position,
which had so plainly beamed from that gentleman's calm eye and
assured bearing? When he met my scrutiny in the sacred precincts
where the one love of his heart lay buried, he did so without a
quiver or any sign of inner disturbance. His tone to Caesar as he
drove off had been the tone of a man who can afford to speak quietly
because he is conscious of being so undeniably the master; and when
his foot rose to the carriage step it was with the confidence of one
who had been kept out of his rights for most of his natural life,
but who feels in his present enjoyment of them no apprehension of a
change. His whole bearing and conversation on that day were, as I
am quite ready to admit, an exhibition of prodigious selfishness;
but it was also an exhibition of mental poise incompatible with a
consciousness of having acquired his fortune by any means which laid
him open to the possibility of losing it. Or so I judged.

Finding myself, with every new consideration of the tantalizing
subject, deeper and deeper in the quagmire of doubt and uncertainty,
I sought enlightenment by making a memorandum of the special points
which must have influenced the jury in their verdict, as witness:

1. The relief shown by Mr. Jeffrey at finding an apparent
communicat