Amabel Page left a merry dance at midnight and stole away into the Sutherland garden in her party dress and slippers—­why?  Not to fulfil an errand which anyone who knows her cold and unsympathetic nature can but regard as a pretext, but because she felt it imperative to see if her lover (with whose character, temptations, and necessities she was fully acquainted, and in whose excited and preoccupied manner she had probably discovered signs of a secretly growing purpose) meant indeed to elude his guests and slip away to town on the dangerous and unholy enterprise suggested by their mutual knowledge of the money to be obtained there by one daring enough to enter a certain house open like their own to midnight visitors.

She followed at such an hour and into such a place, not an unknown man casually come upon, but her lover, whom she had tracked from the garden of his father’s house, where she had lain in wait for him.  It took courage to do this, but a courage no longer beyond the limit of feminine daring, for her fate was bound up in his and she could not but feel the impulse to save him from the consequences of crime, if not from the crime itself.

As for the aforementioned flower, what more natural than that Frederick should have transferred it from her hair to his buttonhole during some of their interviews at the ball, and that it should have fallen from its place to the floor in the midst of his possible struggle with Batsy?

And with this assumption of her perfect knowledge as to who the man was who had entered Mrs. Webb’s house, how much easier it is to understand why she did not lift her head when she heard him descend the stairs!  No woman, even one so depraved as she, would wish to see the handsome face of her lover in the glare of a freshly committed crime, and besides she might very easily be afraid of him, for a man has but a blow for the suddenly detected witness of his crime unless that witness is his confidant, which from every indication Sweetwater felt bound to believe Amabel was not.

Her flight to the Zabel cottage, after an experience which would madden most women, can now be understood.  She was still following her lover.  The plan of making Agatha’s old and wretched friend amenable for her death originated with Frederick and not with Amabel.  It was he who first started for the Zabel cottage.  It was he who left the bank bill there.  This is all clear, and even the one contradictory fact of the dagger having been seen in the old man’s hand was not a stumbling-block to Sweetwater.  With the audacity of one confident of his own insight, he explained it to himself thus:  The dagger thrown from the window by the assassin, possibly because he knew of Zabel’s expected visit there that night, fell on the grass and was picked up by Amabel, only to be flung down again in the brightest part of the lawn.  It was lying there then, when, a few minutes later and before either Frederick or Amabel