By this time we had reached the front door and no one seemed disposed to linger. Though our little dinner had begun auspiciously and full of promise of a pleasant evening, its ending had been rather melancholy and I knew they all felt so and, try as they would, could not throw the weight off. Somehow or other, this death of White seemed fated to bring us all constant trouble. Davis and Van Bult nodded me a farewell as they went away, but Littell held out his hand and, as I took it, said earnestly, almost affectionately: "Your fidelity to your purpose may prove to your sorrow, Dick, but I respect you for it, and I wish some of us could be more like you." "It is you that I would be like," I answered him. "Good-night," he said, and joined the others as they crossed the square. As I stood for a moment, looking after their retreating forms, I saw again the detective I had seen shadowing Winters the day I had met him by White's house. CHAPTER XIII THE TRUTH AT LAST It was nearly two weeks after my little dinner that I sat late one afternoon alone in my office. The rain without pattered dismally against the single window that looked into a deserted court and within the room was dimly lighted by the fading daylight and the fire that flickered on the hearth. The gloom of the close of a rainy winter's day was over everything and my thoughts and heart seemed full of the vague shadows that haunted the room. I was awaiting the coming of Miles, who that morning had sent me word that he had something to report. During the past fortnight he had been persistently engaged in working on his new theory of the case, but with what results I did not know, for he had told me nothing. I also had at first made an effort to accomplish something along the same lines, for I had found inaction almost unbearable, but it proved to no purpose. The time had passed for analyses of conditions; what was now needed was expert detective work, and this I could not do, and so I had to give it up and in despair resign myself to idly waiting on Miles. I might have sought the companionship of Van Bult and Davis, for they were about as usual, doing the same old things in the same old way, but I was not disposed to engage in their amusements and I doubt much if they were anxious for the society of a man in a condition of mind such as mine. From Littell I had only heard once since his departure and that letter recently received from Florida was but to tell me that he was about starting for home. He was coming back, he wrote, to again conduct the defence of Winters; if it were so, it would prove but a wasted errand, I feared, for there seemed little likelihood of Winters needing our services again. He was very ill, and no longer confined in a cell, but in the hospital ward of the prison to which he had been removed by the physician's orders after the trial. His strength was gone, and it did not need the professional eye to see that he was dying.