on the latter’s part Frederick was able to leave the house without running across him, was a matter of comparative unimportance.  What is of importance is that he did leave it and that Amabel, knowing it was Frederick, strove to make her auditors believe it was Zabel, who carried the remainder of the money into the woods.  Yet she did not say so, and if her words on this subject could be carefully recalled, one would see that it was still her lover she was following and no old man, tottering on the verge of the grave and only surviving because of the task he was bent on performing.

Amabel’s excuse for handling the treasure, and for her reburial of the same, comes now within the bounds of possibility.  She hoped to share this money some day, and her greed was too great for her to let such an amount lie there untouched, while her caution led her to bury it deeper, even at the risk of the discovery she was too inexperienced to fear.

That she should forget to feign surprise when the alarm of murder was raised was very natural, and so was the fact that a woman with a soul so blunted to all delicate instincts, and with a mind so intent upon perfecting the scheme entered into by the murderer of throwing the blame upon the man whose dagger had been made use of, should persist in visiting the scene of crime and calling attention to the spot where that dagger had fallen.  And so with her manner before her examiners.  Baffling as that manner was, it still showed streaks of consistency, when you thought of it as the cloak of a subtle, unprincipled woman, who sees amongst her interlocutors the guilty man whom by a word she can destroy, but whom she exerts herself to save, even at the cost of a series of bizarre explanations.  She was playing with a life, a life she loved, but not with sincerity sufficient to rob the game of a certain delicate, if inconceivable, intellectual enjoyment. [Footnote:  That Sweetwater in his hate, and with no real clew to the real situation, should come so near the truth as in this last supposition, shows the keenness of his insight.]

And Frederick?  Had there been anything in his former life or in his conduct since the murder to give the lie to these heavy doubts against him?  On the contrary.  Though Sweetwater knew little of the dark record which had made this young man the disgrace of his family, what he did know was so much against him that he could well see that the distance usually existing between simple dissipation and desperate crime might be easily bridged by some great necessity for money.  Had there been such a necessity?  Sweetwater found it easy to believe so.  And Frederick’s manner?  Was it that of an honest man simply shocked by the suspicions which had fallen upon the woman he loved?  Had he, Sweetwater, not observed certain telltale moments in his late behaviour that required a deeper explanation even than this?