"Yes, I found her here yesterday," he nodded. "I found her--this murderess--married to my good friend, who loved her madly--as poor Andrea loved her. While I had never seen her, I knew her from that picture of her that lay beside Andrea when he died. Every detail of that face was burned into my memory; I recognized her instantly. And she--the name and the family resemblance--she, too, knew me for who I am. "Kirklan Gilmore saw that something was wrong, but I could not tell him. He was my friend; she was his wife; my lips were sealed. I swear to you that no thought of killing her entered my mind, although in the past I had thought many times of putting my fingers about her throat and----" "Huh!" broke in Ham Griggs' grunt. "I guess you'd swear to most anything to keep yourself from goin' to the chair. What made you hold out on us about knowin' who she was, if you wasn't guilty?" "As I told you a few minutes ago," answered Sarbella, "there were two reasons. One was that I wished to spare Gilmore, my friend, the torture of the truth." "And the other reason," said Griggs, "was that you knowed blame well it would make things look purty black for you. You knowed that it would throw suspicion square on you." Sarbella hesitated. "At first," he replied slowly, "I had no other thought than that the woman had ended her life--driven to suicide by fear, fear that I would denounce her for what she was before her husband; but, when the butler kept insisting that she had been murdered, I knew that I had a vitally personal reason for keeping silent." "But little good it did you--thanks to this feller," exulted the constable, jerking his thumb toward the newspaper man. "Victor Sarbella, you're under arrest for----" "Be careful, sir--be careful," warned the guest of Greenacres, his face gray. "The gun is not mine, and you will never be able to prove that it was. If you subject me to false arrest----" Ham Griggs hesitated, glancing at Doctor Bushnell for encouragement. "I don't think you need worry about false arrest," advised the doctor. "An officer has a perfect right to hold a man on suspicion. There need not be positive proof, and there were but three persons on the second floor when the shot was fired--Mrs. Gilmore, Miss Joan, and Sarbella." Victor Sarbella leaned forward in his chair, and he seemed on the verge of saying something further in his own defense, but did not speak. It may have been that he realized how useless it would be to say anything further in his own behalf. The constable dragged from his pocket a pair of handcuffs. "Stick out your mitts," he ordered, holding open the steel jaws to receive Sarbella's wrists. CHAPTER XVI THE FOUR CLEWS