DESPERATE MIDNIGHT ENCOUNTER IN FINANCIER'S LIBRARY WOUNDED MAN UNCONSCIOUS BUT STILL ALIVE MYSTERIOUS WOMAN INVOLVED Cameron Craig was not dead! If he lived, he must one day learn that the letters were gone from the safe. Would he not then connect her with their disappearance? What would he do? She was aware, unhappily, to what lengths he was capable of going! Even though the letters were not his, would he accuse her of stealing them--_her_? As she drove away the last two lines seemed to imprint themselves on her eyeballs in monstrous symbols of flame. CHAPTER XXIV THE WOMAN WHO KNEW June came with its gold-born days, its passionate bird-songs and scents of roses, its shimmer of willow and pine and burnished lustre of down-bent holly-leaves and its evening mists wreathing the tall garden shrubs like wedding-veils. But the beauty and passion of the throbbing season came to Echo with a sense of mockery. The night of her return she had carried out her plan as regarded the letters and her father had believed the package had arrived with his mail. When a little later he had told her that Cameron Craig had sent him the letter whose publication had been threatened, years had seemed fallen from his shoulders. She had been content that he should deem the act significant of the other's better nature emerging from the slough of an ignoble temptation--satisfied to know that in his mind the fact that it should have been one of the last acts Craig had performed before the tragedy, had invested it with a quality of the fateful and foreordained. Her own thought was absorbed with other things. She had read avidly, though with unspeakable dread and loathing, the newspaper accounts of the affair. The refusal of the arrested man to tell his name or where he came from, or to explain in the slightest detail--except brazenly to deny any part in it--the crime which had set the city in which it had occurred agog, had been duly chronicled; but the condition of the victim--since Cameron Craig was a power in the community--had absorbed a greater part of the popular interest, and the daily bulletins of his physicians had called forth far more comment than the unknown criminal whom he had identified as the man who had shot him. She had felt a great relief, also, in the knowledge that Craig had declared that he had not known his feminine visitor; and while the dread had inevitably lifted that when he discovered the loss of the letters he might betray her, it had faded at length in the certainty that, though he lived, the brain-injury had left him with clouded consciousness. Day after day he had lain voiceless, the outer injury gradually and surely yielding to the medicaments of healing, but the brain lapsed into a semblance of vacuity, inert and unresponsive, a mild phantom of the old Craig, the bodily functions become mere mechanism, the mind blank and fallow, its inner hurt waiting a diagnosis beyond the skill of local practitioners.