He stopped awkwardly, just as by inadvertence he was about to say that which all along he had studiously refrained from suggesting.

“To suspect me,” Edith Morriston completed his sentence with a smile.

“No,” he continued frankly.  “You would have been the last person to enter my head in that connexion.  And then Kelson came out of the passage from the tower with Miss Tredworth, to whom he had just proposed.  He introduced me in a way which suggested their new relationship, and we had just began to chat when to my horror I noticed what to my mind went to prove that she was the person for whom I was looking.  There were dark red stains on the white roses she wore on her dress.  It was an unpleasant shock to me, placing me, as it seemed, in a terribly difficult position.  For, at the first blush of my discovery, it all seemed to fit in.  Clement Henshaw had been, I imagined, in love with Miss Tredworth before Kelson appeared on the scene.  She had thrown him over for my friend, and Henshaw, taking his rejection in bad part, had threatened to expose some questionable incident in her past.  Now that is all happily explained away, and I won’t retrace the steps by which my imagination led me on; but you see how painfully I was situated with respect to my friend.

“That is my story, Miss Morriston.  Had I known what I know now I should not have kept it to myself so long; but up to a certain point, until the last few days, there seemed no reason for making the dangerous secret known to any one.  Now, when it appears necessary to protect you from this man, Henshaw, the account of the part I played in the tragedy must be told in your interest.”

Edith Morriston drew in a deep breath as Gifford ceased speaking.  “It is very kind and chivalrous of you, Mr. Gifford,” she said in a low voice, “to run this risk for me, although your telling me the story shall never involve you in danger.”

“I am ready for your sake to face any danger the telling of my secret may hold for me,” he responded firmly.

“I am sure of that, as I am sure of you,” she replied.  Then added with a change of tone, “You were certain for a while that Muriel Tredworth had not only been guilty of something discreditable in her past but had stabbed to death in your presence the man who knew her secret.”

“I’m afraid there seemed to me no alternative but to believe it,” he acknowledged.

“When you found out that you were mistaken in her identity and that she had nothing whatever to do with the tragedy you would naturally transfer the opinion you had held of her to—­to the other woman—­the one who was actually there?”

The question was put searchingly and was not to be evaded.

“That would be a natural consequence,” Gifford admitted frankly.  “But there was in my mind always a growing doubt whether the wound had not been given accidentally.  And that doubt became almost certainty when the real identity of Henshaw’s victim became apparent.”