Part 61

"No! Oh, no!"

Some quick and overmastering emotion broke down the last of her endurance. Whether it was a new and finer appreciation of his persistent, untiring search for the guilty man, or the realization of how sincerely he liked her, giving her credit for a frankness she had not exercised--whatever the pivotal consideration was, she felt that she could no longer deceive him.

She closed her lips tightly, to keep back the rising sobs, and regarded him with questioning, fearful eyes.

"What is it?" he asked gently, reading her appealing look.

"I've a confession to make," she said miserably.

He refused to treat it as a tragedy.

"But it can't be very bad!" he exclaimed pleasantly. "When we're overwrought, imagination's like a lantern swinging in the wind, changing the size of everything every second."

"But it is bad!" she insisted. "I haven't been fair. I couldn't bring myself to tell you this. I tried to think you'd get along without it!"

"And now?"

She answered him with an outward calmness which was, in reality, emotional dullness. She had suffered so much that to feel vividly was beyond her strength.

"You have the right to know it," she said, looking at him out of brilliant, unwinking eyes. "It's about father. He was out there--on the lawn--before he turned on the light in his room. I heard him come in, a minute before Berne went down the back stairs and out to the lawn. And I heard him go to his window and stand there, looking out, at least five long minutes before he flashed on his light."

He waited, thinking she might have more to tell. Construing his silence as reproof, she said, without changing either her expression or her voice:

"I know--it's awful. I should have told you. Perhaps, I've done great harm."

"You've been very brave," he consoled her, with infinite tenderness. "But it happens that I'd already satisfied myself on that point. I knew he'd been out there."

She was dumb, incapable of reacting to his words. Even the fact that he was smiling, with genuine amusement, did not affect her.

"Here comes the grotesque element, the comical, that's involved in so many tragedies," he explained. "Your father's weakness for 'cure' of nervousness, and his shrinking from the ridicule he's suffered because of it--there's the explanation of why he was out there that night."

She could not see significance in that, but neither could she summon energy to say so. She wondered vaguely why he thought it funny.

"That night--rather, the early morning hours following--while the rest of you were in the library, I looked through his room, and I found a pair of straw sandals in the closet--such as a man could slip on and off without having to bend down to adjust them. And they were wet, inside and out.

"Sunday morning, when Judge Wilton and I were at his bedside, I saw on the table a 'quack' pamphlet on the 'dew' treatment for nervousness, the benefit of the 'wet, cooling grass' upon the feet at night. You know the kind of thing. So----"

"Oh-h-h!" she breathed, tremulous and weak. "So that's why he was out there! Why didn't I think? Oh, how I've suspected him of----"

"But remember," he warned; "that's why he went out. We still don't know what he--what happened after he got out there--or why he's refused to say that he ever was out there. When we think of this, and other things, and, too, his call tonight on Mrs. Brace, for bribery--leaving what we thought was a sickbed--"

"But he's been up all day!" she corrected.

"And yet," he said, and stopped, reflecting.

"Tell me," she implored; "tell me, Mr. Hastings, do you suspect my father--or not--of the----?"

He answered her unfinished question with a solemn, painstaking care:

"Miss Sloane, you're not one who would want to be misled. You can bear the truth. I'd be foolish to say that he's not under suspicion. He is. Any one of the men there that night may have committed the murder. Webster, your father, Wilton--only there, suspicion seems totally gratuitous--Eugene Russell, Jarvis--I've heard things about him--any one of them may have struck that blow--may have."

"And father," she said, in a grieved bewilderment, "has paid Mrs. Brace to stop saying she suspects Berne," she shuddered, facing the alternative, "or himself!"

"You see," he framed the conclusion for her, "how hard he makes it for us to keep him out of trouble--if that gets out. He's put his hand on the live wire of circumstantial evidence, a wire that too often thrashes about, striking the wrong man."