"Doctor Dollar," returned Lady Vera, under great control, "it was about this case, and nothing else, that I wanted to speak to the Home Secretary. I never heard of it until this morning, for I have been out of the way of newspapers, as you may know; and it is difficult to take in a whole trial at one hurried reading. Do you mind telling me why everybody is so sure that this man is the murderer? Did anybody see him do it?" The crime doctor smiled as he shook his head. "Very few murders are actually witnessed, Lady Vera; yet this would have been one of the few, but for the fog. Croucher was plainly seen through the jeweler's window, helping himself one moment, then struggling with the unfortunate sergeant." "Was the struggle seen as plainly as the robbery?" "Not quite, perhaps, but the evidence was equally convincing about both. Then the stolen goods were found, some of them, still in Croucher's possession; and the way he tried to account for that, in the witness-box, was only less suicidal than his fatal attempt at an alibi." "Poor fool!" exclaimed Lady Vera, with perhaps less pity than impatience. "Of course he was there--I saw him!" Dollar was not altogether unprepared for this. "You were there yourself, then, Lady Vera?" "I should think I was!" "It--it wasn't you who broke the window for him?" "Of course it was! Yet nobody tried to find me as a witness! It is only by pure chance that I come out in time to save an innocent man's life, for innocent he is of everything but theft. _I_ know--too well!" Her voice was no longer under inhuman control; and there was something in its passionate pitch that sent a cold thrill of conviction down Dollar's spine. He gazed in horror at the unhappy girl, in her luxurious sables, drawn up to her last inch in the pitiless glare of his electric light; and even as he gazed--and guessed--all horror melted into the most profound emotion he had ever felt. It was she who first found her voice, and now it was calmer than it had been as yet. "One thing more about the trial," she said. "What was the weapon he is supposed to have used?" "His knife." "Yet it seems to have been a small wound?" "It had a small blade." "But was there any blood on it?" She had to press him for these details; any squeamishness was on his side, and he a doctor! "There was," he said. "Croucher had an explanation, but it wasn't convincing." "The truth often isn't," said Lady Vera, bitterly. "You may be surprised to hear that the blow wasn't struck with a knife at all. It was struck with--this!" Her right hand flew from her glossy muff; in it was no flashing steel, but a short, black, round-knobbed life-preserver, that she handed over without more words. "But his skull wasn't smashed!" exclaimed John Dollar, and for an instant he looked at his visitor with the eye of the alienist. "It was a puncture of the carotid artery, and you couldn't do that with this if you tried."