“Not a glimpse.”

“So you are in no position to identify him?”

“If by any chance I should hear those same footsteps coming down a flight of stairs, I think I should be able to recognise them,” she allowed, in the sweetest tones at her command.

“She knows it is too late for her to hear those of the two dead Zabels,” growled the man from Boston.

“We are no nearer the solution of this mystery than we were in the beginning,” remarked the coroner.

“Gentlemen, I have not yet finished my story,” intimated Amabel, sweetly.  “Perhaps what I have yet to tell may give you some clew to the identity of this man.”

“Ah, yes; go on, go on.  You have not yet explained how you came to be in possession of Agatha’s money.”

“Just so,” she answered, with another quick look at Frederick, the last she gave him for some time.  “As soon, then, as I dared, I ran out of the house into the yard.  The moon, which had been under a cloud, was now shining brightly, and by its light I saw that the space before me was empty and that I might venture to enter the street.  But before doing so I looked about for the dagger I had thrown from me before going in, but I could not find it.  It had been picked up by the fugitive and carried away.  Annoyed at the cowardice which had led me to lose such a valuable piece of evidence through a purely womanish emotion, I was about to leave the yard, when my eyes fell on the little bundle of sandwiches which I had brought down from the hill and which I had let fall under the pear tree, at the first scream I had heard from the house.  It had burst open and two or three of the sandwiches lay broken on the ground.  But those that were intact I picked up, and being more than ever anxious to cover up by some ostensible errand my absence from the party, I rushed away toward the lonely road where these brothers lived, meaning to leave such fragments as remained on the old doorstep, beyond which I had been told such suffering existed.

“It was now late, very late, for a girl like myself to be out, but, under the excitement of what I had just seen and heard, I became oblivious to fear, and rushed into those dismal shadows as into transparent daylight.  Perhaps the shouts and stray sounds of laughter that came up from the wharves where a ship was getting under way gave me a certain sense of companionship.  Perhaps—­but it is folly for me to dilate upon my feelings; it is my errand you are interested in, and what happened when I approached the Zabels’ dreary dwelling.”

The look with which she paused, ostensibly to take breath, but in reality to weigh and criticise the looks of those about her, was one of those wholly indescribable ones with which she was accustomed to control the judgment of men who allowed themselves to watch too closely the ever-changing expression of her weird yet charming face.  But it fell upon men steeled against her fascinations, and realising her inability to move them, she proceeded with her story before even the most anxious of her hearers could request her to do so.