“Nevertheless, possibly you know,” he said, biting each word off short, “how many persons beside yourself and Bartlett, Monteagle’s former chauffeur, who bought it, knew of the rope in his closet; knew that Monteagle had a morbid fear of being trapped in that building at night by fire; that he had had that fear since his friend Mervin was burned to death in the Baldwin Hotel fire; that he let no one know about the rope for fear of being ridiculed? How many persons, I say, besides yourself and Bartlett, knew the rope was there? _And when you knew that that rope had disappeared, as you must have known it, why didn’t you tell the police? Why did you permit a man to lie in prison whom you in your heart feel is innocent?_” She sprang to her feet and threw both hands towards him as though warding off physical blows. She was trembling in intense agitation. “Don’t! Don’t! for God’s sake, don’t!” She sank back again into her chair, her face buried in her hands, rocking and moaning, with Lanagan standing over her, inexorable as Nemesis. There was the sound of quick, light running up the front stairs, a key was turned in the lock, the front door swung open, and the girl in the chair, startled from her huddled misery, sprang to her feet and fairly leaped to meet the newcomer. She cried out, but whether in warning or in the joy of greeting could not be said, for her voice was half-smothered in a sob. “Sister!” she said at last falteringly. “Sister, please go to your room. It is only some more policemen about Mr. Monteagle!” The words came chokingly. The other had not as yet come into our sight, but now she stepped into the light that streamed from the parlour into the hall--and I heard Lanagan’s swift, involuntary ejaculation: “_La Pattini! Her sister!_” Leslie, swift as thought, was half-across the parlour floor to the hall, yielding to a natural police impulse, but the newcomer, the other girl clinging to her, stepped fully into the doorway to the parlour. “Yes,” she said in a voice that had no tremour of emotion, “La Pattini. Her sister. Why?” “Why?” said Leslie, grimly. “Because we were just going to book her for murder as an accessory before the fact. We will switch the cut now and book you as the principal.” At the feet of the queenly Pattini the harassed sister swooned. Lanagan pulled shut the door leading to the hall so that no one might by any mischance disturb us, and I fell to chafing the wrists of the senseless girl. La Pattini sank wearily to a chair, stooping so that she could stroke her sister’s temples. “I am glad it is over,” she said, apathetically. “I have only wondered that it did not come sooner. I have expected it hourly.”