Page:Wadsworth Camp--the gray mask.djvu/102

92 there was never anything really out of the way. She wasn't quite happy with the doctor. It would be a kindness to the dead—"

Garth smiled, turning to Nora.

"You wouldn't give me away, would you? All right, Thompson. Do what you came to do."

Thompson shot him a grateful glance and returned to his obliterating task at the desk. Garth snapped on the light.

"But, Jim," Nora asked, "how did you know that man had been a witness? Was it a guess?"

Garth shook his head.

"Simple enough," he said.

He took a short, slender, silvery thread from his pocket. With a shame-faced look he handed it to Nora.

"You'd know more about such things than I. It's a wire that made a broken, worn-out rose look a whole lot better than it was. I found it and the rose in the next room. I recognized it, because, Nora, when I came to dinner the other night I stopped at a sidewalk stand and bought a rose for my button-hole. Silly, wasn't it? But it was a good thing, because I got stung with one of those. That's why I knew what the broken stem and the wire meant. I learned that Randall didn't wear flowers, and I made sure this afternoon what kind of a rose Treving would have worn. Therefore, somebody else had been in that room, wearing a cheap rose which he had almost certainly got at that cheap wedding. When I heard Randall had