"Secondly, we can show that you left your home in Buffalo the day before the assault, came to Monteith, the next town to this, alighted at the remote station assigned to the use of the quarrymen, crossed the hills and threaded the woods till you came to a small hut back of your aunt's house, where you put up for the night. "Thirdly, evidence is not lacking to prove that while there you visited your aunt's once, if not twice; the last time on the very morning she was killed, entering the house in a surreptitious way by the back door, and leaving it in the same suspicious manner. "And fourthly, we can prove that you escaped from this place as you had come, secretly, and through a difficult and roundabout path over the hills. "Mr. Mansell, these facts, taken with your reticence concerning a visit so manifestly of importance to the authorities to know, must strike even you as offering grounds for a suspicion as grave as that attaching to Mr. Hildreth." With a restraint marked as it was impressive, Mr. Mansell looked at the District Attorney for a moment, and then said: "You speak of proof. Now, what proof have you to give that I put up, as you call it, for a night, or even for an hour, in the hut which stands in the woods back of my aunt's house?" "This," was Mr. Ferris' reply. "It is known you were in the woods the afternoon previous to the assault upon your aunt, because you were seen there in company with a young lady with whom you were holding a tryst. Did you speak, sir?" "No!" was the violent, almost disdainful, rejoinder. "You did not sleep at your aunt's, for her rooms contained not an evidence of having been opened for a guest, while the hut revealed more than one trace of having been used as a dormitory. I could even tell you where you cut the twigs of hemlock that served you for a pillow, and point to the place where you sat when you scribbled over the margin of the Buffalo _Courier_ with a blue pencil, such as that I now see projecting from your vest pocket." "It is not necessary," replied the young man, heavily frowning. Then with another short glance at Mr. Ferris, he again demanded: "What is your reason for stating I visited my aunt's house on the morning she was murdered? Did any one see me do it? or does the house, like the hut, exhibit traces of my presence there at that particular time?" There was irony in his tone, and a disdain almost amounting to scorn in his wide-flashing blue eyes; but Mr. Ferris, glancing at the hand clutched about the railing of the desk, remarked quietly: "You do not wear the diamond ring you carried away with you from the tryst I mentioned? Can it be that the one which was picked up after the assault, on the floor of Mrs. Clemmens' dining-room, could have fallen from your finger, Mr. Mansell?" A start, the first this powerfully repressed man had given, showed that his armor of resistance had been pierced at last.