keeping it in front of her.
She moved her left hand, a quiet gesture indicating her lack of further interest in the piece of paper.
"Nothing special," she said, "except that the top line seems to bear out what I've told you. It might be: 'repeatedly demanded' – I mean Mildred may have written that she had repeatedly demanded justice of him, something of that sort."
"Is it your daughter's writing?"
"Yes."
"And the word 'Pursuit,' with an exclamation point after it? That suggest anything to you?"
"Why, no." She showed her first curiosity: "Where did you get that piece of envelope?"
"Not from Berne Webster," he said, smiling.
"I suppose not," she agreed, and did not press him for the information.
"You said," he went to another point, "that the sheriff attached no importance to your belief in Webster's guilt. Can you tell me why?"
Her contempt was frank enough now, and visible, her lips thickening and assuming the abnormally humid appearance he had noticed before.
"He thinks the footsteps which Miss Sloane says she heard are the deciding evidence. He accuses a young man named Russell, Eugene Russell, who's been attentive to Mildred."
Hastings was relieved.
"Crown's seen him, seen Russell?" he asked, not troubling to conceal his eagerness.
On that, he saw the beginnings of wrath in her eyes. The black eyebrows went upward, the thin nostrils expanded, the lips set to a line no thicker than the edge of a knife.
"You, too, will – "
She broke off, checked by the ringing of the wall telephone in the entrance hall. She answered the call, moving without haste. It was for Mr. Hastings, she said, going back to her seat.
He regretted the interruption; it would give her time to regain the self-control she had been on the point of losing.
Sheriff Crown was at the other end of the wire. He was back at Sloanehurst, he explained, and Miss Sloane had asked him to give the detective certain information:
He had asked the Washington police to hold Eugene Russell, or to persuade him to attend the inquest at Sloanehurst. Crown, going in to Washington, had stopped at the car barns of the electric road which passed Sloanehurst, and had found a conductor who had made the ten-thirty run last night. This conductor, Barton, had slept at the barns, waiting for the early-morning resumption of car service to take him to his home across the city.
Barton remembered having seen a man leave his car at Ridgecrest, the next stop before Sloanehurst, at twenty-five minutes past ten last night. He answered Russell's description, had seemed greatly agitated, and was unfamiliar with the stops on the line, having questioned Barton as to the distance between Ridgecrest and Sloanehurst. That was all the conductor had to tell.
"Mrs. Brace's description of Russell, a real estate salesman who had been attentive to her daughter," continued Crown, "tallied with Barton's description of the man who had been on his car. I got his address from her. But say! She don't fall for the idea that Russell's guilty! She gave me to understand, in that snaky, frozen way of hers, that I was a fool for thinking so.
"Anyway, I'm going to put him over the jumps!" The sheriff was highly elated. "What was he out here for last night if he wasn't jealous of the girl? Wasn't he following her? And, when he came up with her on the Sloanehurst lawn, didn't he kill her? It looks plain to me; simple. I told you it was a simple case!"
"Have you seen him?" Hastings was looking at his watch as he spoke – it was nine o'clock.
"No; I went to his boarding house, waked up the place at three o'clock this morning. He wasn't there."
Hastings asked for the number of the house. It was on Eleventh street, Crown informed him, and gave the number.
"I searched his room," the sheriff added, his voice self-congratulatory.
"Find anything?"
"I should say! The nail file was missing from his dressing case."
"What else?"
"A pair of wet shoes – muddy and wet."
"Then, he'd returned to his room, after the murder, and gone out again?"
"That's it – right."
"Anybody in the house hear him come in, or go out?"
"Not a soul. – And I don't know where he is now."
Hastings, leaving the telephone, found Mrs. Brace carefully brushing into a newspaper the litter made by his whittling. Her performance of that trivial task, the calm thoroughness with which she went about it, or the littleness of it, when compared with her complete indifference to the tragedy which should have overwhelmed her – something, he could not tell exactly what, made her more repugnant to him than ever.
He spoke impulsively:
"Did you want – didn't you feel some impulse, some desire, to go out there when you heard of this murder?"
She paused in her brushing, looking up to him without lifting herself from hands and knees.
"Why should I have wanted to do any such thing?" she replied. "Mildred's not out there. What's out there is – nothing."
"Do you know about the arrangements for the removal of the body?"
"The sheriff told me," she replied, cold, impersonal. "It will be brought to an undertaking establishment as soon as the coroner's jury has viewed it."
"Yes – at ten o'clock this morning."
She made no comment on that. He had brought up the disagreeable topic – one which would have been heart-breaking to any other mother he had ever known – in the hope of arousing some real feeling in her. And he had failed. Her self-control was impregnable. There was about her an atmosphere that was, in a sense, terrifying, something out of all nature.
She brushed up the remaining chips and shavings while he got his hat. He was deliberating: was there nothing more she could tell him? What could he hope to get from her except that which she wanted to tell? He was sure that she had spoken, in reply to each of his questions, according to a prearranged plan, a well designed scheme to bring into high relief anything that might incriminate Berne Webster.
And he was by no means in a mood to persuade himself of Webster's guilt. He knew the value of first impressions; and he did not propose to let her clog his thoughts with far-fetched deductions against the young lawyer.
She got to her feet with cat-like agility, and, to his astonishment, burst into violent speech:
"You're standing there trying to think up things to help Berne Webster! Like the sheriff! Now, I'll tell you what I told him: Webster's guilty. I know it! He killed my daughter. He's a liar and a coward – a traitor! He killed her!"
There was no doubt of her emotion now. She stood in a strange attitude, leaning a little toward him in the upper part of her body, as if all her strength were consciously directed into her shoulders and neck. She seemed larger in her arms and shoulders; they, with her head and face, were,
