"Honor bright!" Calvin wrote. "Well, Mrs. Knox was a great admirer of the late William Zane. They were very intimate--some thought under engagement to marry. Suddenly she accepted my brother, and old Zane turned out to be infatuated with his ward. We may call it rivalry and reminiscence." "Jer-i-choo-wo!" Duff Salter, now full of smiles, proffered a pinch of snuff to his host, who declined it, but set out a bottle of brandy in reciprocal friendship. "Go on," indicated Salter to the tablets. "One morning, just before daybreak, my brother's wife, glancing out of this window--" "In this room, you say, before daybreak?" Calvin looked viciously at Duff Salter, who merely smiled. "She saw," said Calvin Van de Lear, "an object come out of the trap-door on Zane's old residence and move under shelter of the ridge of the roof to the newly-tenanted dwelling in the same block, and there disappear down the similar trap." "Jericho! Jericho!--Proceed." "It was our inference that probably Andrew Zane was making stealthy visits to Agnes, and we applied a test to her. To our astonishment we found she had only seen him once since the murder, and that was the night the bodies were discovered." "How could you extract that from a self-contained woman like Agnes Wilt?" asked Duff Salter, deeply interested. "We got it from Podge Byerly." "Jerusalem!" exclaimed Duff Salter aloud, knocking over the snuff-box and forgetting to sneeze. "Mr. Calvin Van de Lear, it is a damned lie." Calvin locked up with some surprise but more conceit. "I'm a first-class eavesdropper," he wrote, and held it up on the tablet to Duff's eyes. "We got the fact from Podge's bed-ridden brother, a scamp who destroyed his health by excesses and came back on Podge for support. Knowing how corruptible he was, I got access to him and paid him out of your funds to wheedle out of Podge all that Lady Agnes told her. She had no idea that her brother communicated with any person, as he was unable to walk, and she told him for his amusement secrets she never dreamed could go out of the house. We corresponded with him by mail." "Calvin," wrote Duff Salter, "you never thought of these things yourself." "To give the devil his credit, my brother's wife suggested that device." "Jericho-o-o-oh!" Duff Salter was himself again. "Well, Salter," continued the heir-apparent of Kensington, "we laid our heads together, and the mystery continued to deepen why Andrew Zane infested the residence of his murdered father if he never revealed himself to the woman he had loved. Not until the discovery that Agnes Wilt had been ruined could we make that out." They were both looking at each other intently as Duff Salter read the last sentence. "It then became plain to us," continued Calvin, "that Andrew Zane wanted to abandon the woman he had seduced, as was perfectly natural. He haunted and alarmed the house and kept informed on all its happenings, but cut poor Agnes dead."