“If my death here and now, following fast upon that of this unhappy Frenchwoman, would avail to wipe out the evidence I have so laboriously collected against this man, I should welcome it with gratitude.  I shrink from ending my career with the shattering of so fine an image, in the public eye.  What lies back of this crime—­what past memories or present miseries have led to an act which would be called dastardly in the most uninstructed and basest of our sex, I lack the imagination to conceive.  Would to God I had never tried to find out!  But no man standing where Roberts does to-day among the leaders of a great party can fall into such a pit of shame without weakening the faith of the young and making a travesty of virtue and honor.”

“Yet, if he is guilty——­”

“It is our business to pursue him to the end.  Only, I like the man, Sweetwater.  I had a long talk with him yesterday on indifferent matters and I came away liking him.”

This was certainly something Sweetwater had not expected to hear, and it threw him again into silence as he started up the machine and they pursued their course home.

Hard as the day had been for Mr. Gryce, its trials were not yet over.  He had left it to Sweetwater to report the case to the New York authorities and had gone home to rest from the shock of the occurrence and to prepare for that interview with the Chief Inspector which he was satisfied would now lead to an even more exacting one with the District Attorney.

He was met by a messenger from downtown who handed him a letter.  He opened it abstractedly and read the following: 

“Mrs. Taylor is talking.”

He had forgotten Mrs. Taylor.  To have her thus brought forcibly back to mind was a shock heightened, rather than diminished, by a perusal of the few connected words which the careful nurse had transcribed as falling from her delirious patient’s lips.

They were these: 

        I love but thee,
  And thee will I love to eternity.

The exact lines, no more, no less, which Sweetwater had found written on the back of the Swiss clock cherished by Mr. Roberts.

XXVIII

“ROMANTIC!  TOO ROMANTIC!”

Next morning Mr. Gryce left his home an hour earlier than usual.  He wished to have a talk with Mrs. Taylor’s nurse before encountering the Inspector.

It was an inconvenient time for a nurse to leave the sick-bed; but the matter being so important, she was prevailed upon to give him a few moments, in the little reception room where he had seated himself.  The result was meagre—­that is, from her standpoint.  All she had to add to what she had written him the day before was the fact that the two lines of verse quoted in the note she had sent him were Mrs. Taylor’s first coherent utterance, and that they had been spoken not only once but many times, in every kind of tone, and with ever-varying emphasis.  That and a dreamy request for “The papers! the papers!” which had followed some action of her own this very morning comprised all she had to give in fulfillment of the promise she had made him at the beginning of this illness.