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198 Mr. Lorne." He smiled noncommittally. "I have come rather to hear what you have to tell me about the whole affair. I understand that it was your desire to notify us even before the portrait fell in the library."

"Yes. I was talking it over with Titheredge when Gene came in with the letter. I felt that those accidents which resulted in the deaths of my poor wife and her son with so short a time between might have been deliberately designed to appear as accidents. I don't know why the conviction came to me. There was no one I could suspect, no motive I could fathom; and yet I felt sure as the days passed after Julian's death that something sinister and horrible lay behind it all.

"I'm a plain, hard-headed business man, and never took any stock in this psychic stuff, but there has been an oppression aside from our natural grief in the air; the children all felt it and I shouldn't wonder if Effie, my sister-in-law, did too, although she is such a diffident little body that I doubt if she ever had an independent thought in her life.

"It was as if there were someone else in the house, someone whom we could not see, who was waiting to pick us off one by one like fruit from a tree." He paused, and the ruddy color swept over his face. "I suppose that sounds like damn-fool talk to you. Sergeant; for, as Titheredge said, I hadn't a tangible fact to back up my suspicions until the portrait fell."

"Some more facts are in my possession now, Mr. Lorne, which substantiate your suspicions," Odell observed gravely. "I have proof that that razor was not drawn across your step-son's throat by his own hand, and strong circumstantial evidence, in which the specialists and your family physician