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 after we came home. I persuaded her to try to nibble a bit of toast and drink some chocolate, and the chocolate spattered as I poured it from the pot.”

Hutchins looked at her in undisguised admiration.

“On the spur of the moment?” he asked, frankly, “or had you thought it up before?”

“The simple truth,” persisted Kate, but he saw her eyelids quiver, and he knew it was far from the simple truth.

He didn’t know exactly what to do. He suddenly remembered that the monk’s robe had been found in that same closet, and that the girl might have smeared her sleeve from that. For he felt sure the dark stain on Locke’s robe was blood. Did Pearl Jane know that?

But if Detective Hutchins’ thoughts were chaotic, and his conclusions contradictory, they were no more so than the conflicting theories that filled the troubled brain of Andrew Barham.

From the moment he stepped in his wife’s car to go back to his own home until he reached it, he was anxious and alarmed as to what the effect of the terrible news would be on Madeleine’s mother.

He had a strange feeling that she would think he was somehow to blame—that he had let this terrible thing come to them. Yet surely he had kept watch and guard over his wife as fully and carefully as she would let him.

His heart was full of grief, and the very fact that he and Madeleine had not been so congenial or happy as some married pairs, served to accentuate rather than mitigate his sorrow. For he had really loved his wife—loved her far more than she ever knew or appreciated. More than she cared, probably. Yet when such a thought came to him he put it away, it seemed a sort of disloyalty.

But, he thought, as he neared home, the first thing to