"How do you know," he quickly asked, "that I carried away a diamond ring from the tryst you speak of?" "Circumstances," returned the District Attorney, "prove it beyond a doubt. Miss Dare----" "Miss Dare!" Oh, the indescribable tone of this exclamation! Mr. Byrd shuddered as he heard it, and looked at Mr. Mansell with a new feeling, for which he had no name. "Miss Dare," repeated the District Attorney, without, apparently, regarding the interruption, "acknowledges she returned you the ring which you endeavored at that interview to bestow upon her." "Ah!" The word came after a moment's pause. "I see the case has been well worked up, and it only remains for me to give you such explanations as I choose to make. Sir," declared he, stepping forward, and bringing his clenched hand down upon the desk at which Mr. Ferris was sitting, "I did not kill my aunt. I admit that I paid her a visit. I admit that I stayed in the woods back of her house, and even slept in the hut, as you have said; but that was on the day previous to her murder, and not after it. I went to see her for the purpose of again urging the claims of my invention upon her. I went secretly, and by the roundabout way you describe, because I had another purpose in visiting Sibley, which made it expedient for me to conceal my presence in the town. I failed in my efforts to enlist the sympathies of my aunt in regard to my plans, and I failed also in compassing that other desire of my heart of which the ring you mention was a token. Both failures unnerved me, and I lay in that hut all night. I even lay there most of the next morning; but I did not see my aunt again, and I did not lift my hand against her life." There was indescribable quiet in the tone, but there was indescribable power also, and the look he levelled upon the District Attorney was unwaveringly solemn and hard. "You deny, then, that you entered the widow's house on the morning of the murder?" "I do." "It is, then, a question of veracity between you and Miss Dare?" Silence. "She asserts she gave you back the ring you offered her. If this is so, and that ring was in your possession after you left her on Monday evening, how came it to be in the widow's dining-room the next morning, if you did not carry it there?" "I can only repeat my words," rejoined Mr. Mansell. The District Attorney replied impatiently. For various reasons he did not wish to believe this man guilty. "You do not seem very anxious to assist me in my endeavors to reach the truth," he observed. "Cannot you tell me what you did with the ring after you left Miss Dare? Whether you put it on your finger, or thrust it into your pocket, or tossed it into the marsh? If you did not carry it to the house, some one else must have done so, and you ought to be able to help us in determining who." But Mr. Mansell shortly responded: