"I owe, still, a good many explanations both to you, Mr. Argyll, and to Mr. Redfield. I can not lay before you the thousand subtle threads by which I trace the course of a pursuit like this, and which makes me successful as a detective; but I can account for some things which at times have puzzled both of you. In the first place there is about me a power not possessed by all--call it instinct, magnetism, clairvoyancy, or remarkable nervous and mental perception. Whatever it is, it enables me, often, to _feel_ the presence of criminals, as well as of very good persons, poets, artists, or marked temperaments of any kind. The day on which this case was placed before me, it was brought by two young men, your nephew and this person now present. I had not been ten minutes with them when I began to perceive that _the murderer was in the room with me_; and before they had left me, I had decided which was the guilty man. But it would have been unpardonable rashness to denounce him without proof; by such a course I would throw him on the defensive, defeat the ends of justice, and overwhelm myself with denunciation. I waited and watched--I put him under surveillance. That night upon which he crossed the Brooklyn ferry to pay the money to the hired assassin, I was upon his track; I heard the angry dismay with which he accused Richard of following him, when the other met him upon this side. It was not very long after I began to investigate the case before he cautiously approached me, as he did you, with hints of the might-be-guilty party; he made me see how much to the interest of his friend Richard it would be if rivals were out of the way, and how desperately that person loved Miss Argyll. (Forgive me, friends, for using plain language--the whole truth must be told.) But I need not dwell on his method, for you must be familiar with it. I confess that he used consummate tact; if I had not read him from the first, I, too, might have been misled. He was not over-eager in the search for suspected persons, as the guilty almost always are. He did _not_ suspect Miss Sullivan, as Richard did. I favored the pursuit of Miss Sullivan for two reasons; the first was to conceal my real suspicions; the next was, after finding her handkerchief in the garden, after the flight, and all those really strong grounds for supposing her connected with the murder, I began to think that she _was_ connected with it, through some interest in James Argyll. I did not know but that she might have been attached to him--that the child she cared for might be his--you see I was totally in the dark as to all the details. I only took it for granted that James was guilty, and had to gather my proofs afterward. It was not until after my interview with Leesy, at Moreland villa, that I became convinced she had nothing to do with the murder, and that all her strange proceedings were the result of the grief she felt at the tragic death of one whom she secretly loved. When I had an