"Then the counsel for the defense pointed out that Miss Weir herself admitted she was going to try to dispose of some of her diamonds when the so-called fraud was discovered. This looked as though she was in the habit of doing so, and so on. This was the defense, but of course I have not told it in legal language. All the time, however, as I told you yesterday, I was sure we held the trump card, which was that in one of the woman's boxes, after she was arrested, a half-finished letter was found. It was to a lover in Australia, asking him if he had received safely the eight hundred pounds she had forwarded to him by the last mail. 'She will never be the wiser,' Margaret Johnstone had written to the lover, 'and the paste do quite as well for her as the real.' "The handwriting of this letter, and the letter signed Kathleen Weir, held by the diamond dealer, and the receipts also signed Kathleen Weir, were then submitted to experts. These men decided they were all really written by the same person. To make a long story short, Margaret Johnstone totally broke down under cross-examination, and began crying hysterically. "'It was the devil tempted me!' she finally cried, and so no doubt it was, but he played her a scurvy trick, for she got a sentence of eight years' penal servitude for listening to his voice." "Oh! poor creature!" said May, pitifully. "My sympathies, I confess, lie with Miss Kathleen Weir," continued Ralph Webster, smiling. "She has lost her diamonds, worth thousands of pounds, which she will never see again, and she might have had a very awkward reflection cast on her honesty. But I admit I am prejudiced in her favor, for just before I started to come here a note in the prettiest language imaginable was handed to me from Miss Kathleen Weir. My modesty forbade me to bring it, or to repeat all she had written. But she paid me a great many compliments on my 'masterly cross-examination'--please remember I am quoting--which, no doubt, she said, 'elicited the truth from that wretched woman.' And, moreover, she wanted me to go to see her to-morrow afternoon, and I mean to go." "Oh! Ralph, to see an actress!" said Miss Webster, in dismay. "Oh! do go," cried May, laughing. "I am dying to hear all about her." "I will go," said Ralph Webster, slowly, not knowing that the hand of Fate was leading him into a pitfall beset with doubt and anxieties from which there was no escape. CHAPTER XXVI. KATHLEEN WEIR. Ralph Webster did as he said he would, and went on the following afternoon to call on the actress, Miss Kathleen Weir. She was expecting him, and her pretty flat was charmingly arranged to receive him, and herself charmingly dressed for the same purpose. She had admired his strong, earnest, dark face in the court the day before, and she was not in the least afraid of showing this. As she rose to receive him--a tall, graceful, slender woman--she held out a shapely white hand.