"DEAR EMILY:--I don't know why I sit down to write to you to-day. I have plenty to do, and morning is no time for indulging in sentimentalities; but I feel strangely lonely and strangely anxious. Nothing goes just to my mind, and somehow the many causes for secret fear which I have always had, assume an undue prominence in my mind. It is always so when I am not quite well. In vain I reason with myself, saying that respectable people do not lightly enter into crime. But there are so many to whom my death would be more than welcome, that I constantly see myself in the act of being----" "Struck, shot, murdered," suggested Dr. Tredwell, perceiving the young man's eye lingering over the broken sentence. "The words are not there," remonstrated Mr. Byrd; but the tone of his voice showed that his professional complacency had been disturbed at last. The other did not answer, but waited with the wisdom of the trapper who sees the quarry nosing round the toils. "There is evidently some family mystery," the young man continued, glancing again at the letter. "But," he remarked, "Mr. Orcutt is a good friend of hers, and can probably tell us what it all means." "Very likely," the other admitted, "if we choose to ask him." Quick as lightning the young man's glance flashed to the coroner's face. "You would rather not put the question to him?" he inquired. "No. As he is the lawyer who, in all probability, will be employed by the criminal in this case, I am sure he would rather not be mixed up in any preliminary investigation of the affair." The young man's eye did not waver. He appeared to take a secret resolve. "Has it not struck you," he insinuated, "that Mr. Orcutt might have other reasons for not wishing to give any expression of opinion in regard to it?" The surprise in the coroner's eye was his best answer. "No," he rejoined. Mr. Byrd at once resumed all his old nonchalance. "The young lady who was here appeared to show such agitated interest in this horrible crime, I thought that, in kindness to her, he might wish to keep out of the affair as much as possible." "Miss Dare? Bless your heart, she would not restrict him in any way. Her interest in the matter is purely one of curiosity. It has been carried, perhaps, to a somewhat unusual length for a woman of her position and breeding. But that is all, I assure you. Miss Dare's eccentricities are well known in this town." "Then the diamond ring was really hers?" Mr. Byrd was about to inquire, but stopped; something in his memory of this beautiful woman made it impossible for him to disturb the confidence of the coroner in her behalf, at least while his own doubts were so vague and shadowy. The coroner, however, observed the young detective's hesitation, and smiled. "Are you thinking of Miss Dare as having any thing to do with this shocking affair?" he asked.