“Impossible!” cried the girl, in something like horror. Waves of crimson went over her face at first, then it became dead white. For answer, he held out to her a little comb of carved dead gold, crusted with rubies. He said: “While you were searching my desk I took this from your hair without waking you. Permit me to restore it.” She took it with trembling fingers, her face burning with mortification. “Miss Vale, what motive was it that dominated you in your sleep, and sent you upon that fruitless quest?” “I cannot tell you,” she faltered, drooping in her seat, her eyes hot with the tears she was too proud to let fall. “Then I will tell _you_,” said Francis Murray sternly. “You were searching for your father’s lost diary, the one on whose disappearance so much anxiety hung during your mother’s trial for her husband’s murder.” Her pale lips parted with a gasp, then closed again without a sound. She could only stare at him with somber, dilated dark eyes. “I shall tell you something else, also, Miss Vale,” he continued almost angrily, his handsome face quite pale, his blue-gray eyes gleaming with repressed excitement. “I have found you out. You are not the innocent, friendless orphan you pretended when you came here. You are a beautiful little fraud, a clever schemer! No, hear me out--what I have to say.” Had a yawning chasm opened at her very feet, Italy Vale could scarcely have been more startled and alarmed than she was at the bold accusation of Francis Murray. A smothered cry escaped her lips, and she fell back, half-fainting, in her seat, her dilated dark eyes staring wildly at her accuser, while his words seemed to ring in her ears in clarion tones: “I have found you out. You are a beautiful little fraud, a clever schemer!” Yet his voice, though deep and stern, had been very low. He did not wish to attract listeners. Her stifled outcry, her alarm, looked to him like detected guilt, so that, after that stern, “You _shall_ hear what I have to say,” he went on determinedly: “You came here, Miss Vale, with a settled purpose. You wish to find out the real murderer of your father. You suspect _me_. Your only grounds of suspicion are the simple and shallow ones that I was the only beneficiary by your parent’s death. So you came to Winthrop to watch me, to hound me down. Would to God that your wretched mother had lived to save you from this madness!” “Madness!” echoed the pale, writhing lips of the girl. He answered hoarsely: “Yes, madness! You think to avenge your father’s murder. A laudable ambition, Miss Vale, but one fraught for you with inconceivable horrors, for the closer you trace the thread of damning guilt, the deeper will you blacken the memory of your dead mother.” In her fierce anger she found voice: “How dare you adjudge her guilty whom the law found innocent?” Francis Murray groaned: