“Mr. Brant told me he was innocent--is that what you mean?” she asked. “That’s it precisely, and I just put it up that he would come pretty near telling you the truth; that you are the one person in the world he wouldn’t lie to. So I had to climb over the fence again, and--well, to cut a long story short, I haven’t had ten hours’ sleep in the last sixty-odd; and--and to-morrow is the day.” She caught despairingly at the straw, as any poor drowning one might. “O Mr. Jarvis, what have you done? what can be done?” “I don’t know that I have done anything. I’ve been desperately tangled up in two theories, and one of them is no good unless I can get rid of the other. Miss Langford, you will know how hard pressed I am when you hear what I came over here to ask you, but you must let to-morrow be my excuse for anything and everything. You have seen your brother and have been with him more or less every day since this thing happened: is he the one who ought to be counting the hours as George Brant is probably counting them this evening?” The early dusk of the winter day was beginning to prick out the arc lights in the downtown circuits, and she stopped to turn back; and so facing him she gave him his answer: “No, Mr. Jarvis, my brother did not do it. I have thought of that--I have been driven to think of it, dreadful as it is; and I have watched him--God forgive me!--I have watched him as an enemy might. _He did not do it!_” Jarvis threw up his head and drew a deep breath of the crisp night air, as a swimmer who feels the bottom under his feet while yet the shore of ultimate safety is afar off. “That helps out a whole lot,” he said; and his involuntary sigh was a measure of the relief which her assurance gave him. “May I walk back with you? I’m not half through.” She suffered him, and he went quickly forward in the path she had cleared for him. “We are now a long way ahead of any point that has been reached hitherto,” he began. “Brant didn’t do it, and your brother didn’t do it. But a man was killed, and if he did not commit suicide, somebody must have killed him. Happily, we don’t have to wrangle with the suicide theory, so we may safely fall back on the alternative. Do you follow me?” Her “Yes” was not a whisper this time; it was an eager little gasp of expectancy. “Good. Now, while I have been holding the William Langford possibility in suspension, as it were, I have been filling in the time by hunting desperately for this shadowy ‘somebody.’ That is why I haven’t had much sleep since Monday night.” “O Mr. Jarvis! Have you found any clew at all?”