"On a black, dark night? nearly forty-eight miles an hour?" "You forget he knew the road and was driving a high-powered racing car. It’s improbable but not impossible." "I count that as a hole, but go on." "Now in this hypothetical case we’ll suppose that as that car flew over the miles the man and the woman in it had high words?" "Hold on," said Jones, holding out his fork—"that’s too big a hole. They were lovers eloping, not an old married couple." "I’ll explain that later. The high words inflamed and enraged the man to the point of murder and he conceived a horrible plan. As they neared the Wayside Arbor he told the woman something was wrong with the car and sent her to the place ostensibly to telephone, really to establish her presence there at a time when, had she been with him, she could hardly have got that far." I jumped in there. I knew it was only fooling, but even so I didn’t like hearing Mr. Reddy talked about that way. "Who did he send her to telephone to, Mr. Jasper—himself?" Babbitts laughed and jerked his head toward me. "Listen to our little belle sounding the curfew on Jasper." But Mr. Jasper was ready. "He could have done that, knowing his house was empty. Hines, you remember, said she wasn’t five minutes in the booth. We’ve only Reddy’s word for that message. We don’t even know if she got a connection. I telephoned out to the Corona operator Saturday and she answered that there was no record of the message and she herself remembered nothing about it." "But Sylvia," I said—"she told Hines she was expecting someone to come for her." "Sylvia was eloping. Mightn’t she have told Hines—who was curious and intrusive—what wasn’t true?" A sort of hush fell on us all. Babbitts’s face and Jones’s, from being just amused, were intent and interested. "Go ahead, Jasper," said Babbitts, "if this isn’t buying the baby a frock it’s good yarning." Jasper went on. "Her story of the broken automobile _she_ believed to be true. But she didn’t want Hines to know who she was or what she was up to, so she invented the person coming to take her home. Why she sat so long there talking is—I’ll admit—a hole, but I said in the beginning there would be some. The end is just like the end of Jones’s case. She went back to Reddy and he killed her with, as our friend has suggested, one of the auto tools. Very soon after it would have been as that Bohemian—what’s her name?—heard the scream at ten-ten." "That’s all very well," said Jones, "but before we go further I’d like you to furnish us with a motive." "Nothing easier—jealousy." "Jealousy!" I said, sudden and sharp. "Jealousy in its most violent form. The lady in this case was a peculiar type—a natural born siren. She had made the man jealous, furiously jealous. _That_ was the reason of the high words in the motor." "Who was he jealous of?" It was I again who asked that. Jasper turned round and looked at me with a smile.