clutching my basket, though all the mushrooms had fallen out, and my foot was through a torn flounce, and my hat hanging on my neck. My mouth was dry. For a moment I couldn't get a word off my tongue; and then, "He fell, he fell!" I said, and, "He is gone!"

"Where was it?" The words seemed to be in Mr. Dingley's voice, yet came as if from, far off.

"Mr. Rood's gambling-house!" I gasped, and felt the top of my head getting cold and the floor beginning to move under me. I had a dim impression of Mr. Dingley rushing out of the room with his napkin still in his hand; then I found myself sitting on the sofa, with a stinging taste of brandy on my tongue, and heard father's voice saying, "Can't you tell me, child?"

"Oh," I said, "he's dead!" And then I poured all the story out in a breath. I saw father's face growing more and more keen and grave and I could feel his fingers gently around my arm as if he feared my turning faint again. Indeed the room around me seemed unreal, but what had happened in the street was still fearfully clear. It was cut into my mind as if it were still before my eyes, the toppling lurch of the falling body, the silk hat rolling into the gutter, and then that fine terrible gentleman that had sprung out after. The moment had stamped him as clear in my memory as years could have done. I could tell how very tall he was, how dark, how his brows made one black bar across his forehead, how his eyes were set deeply under them, how his chin was wide and keen and his left cheek flicked by a white scar near the mouth. At the time in my furious excitement I only knew that I must tell some one everything, or the thing would kill me. But whether it was father's strange stern face, his seeming so calm and going out so quietly, and yet in such haste; or whether it was some memory of the hunted look of the man who had flung away the pistol, I wished I had not described him so exactly. It would have been easy enough to have said I could not remember him clearly.

I was so stunned by what had happened before my eyes that I could not even formulate in my thoughts what it had been. The very impression of terror that remained with me was confused, and mixed with wounding pity. For though he had looked so wild I could not remember that he had seemed ferocious or afraid. The look I remembered had not been fear of what was going to happen to him, but horror of what had been done—and horror at sight of me.

Voices in the street, sounding unwontedly loud and excited, reached me. People were hurrying past the house—all hurrying downward in the same direction. I saw Lee run across the yard and stand peering out of the side gate. I put my hands over my ears, and up and down, up and down I walked; and back and forth Abby followed me with a little plaid shawl she was trying to put over my shoulders.

CHAPTER II

THE EVIDENCE

It did not seem possible that Mr. Dingley and father could be gone longer than half an hour, but the hands of the clock went to nine and then to ten before I heard them on the steps. I made a dash ahead of Abby, and opened the door. "Did he get away?" The words flew off my tongue before I could think. I knew it had been a dreadfully wrong thing to say. "I mean the other man—is he dead?" I gasped. Father had quickly closed the front door behind him, for there seemed to be quite a crowd in the street, and there in the half dark I could see his face, and Mr. Dingley's, only as palish spots in the gloom. The thought came to me, "Of course he isn't going to tell me anything. He is going to say it is nothing I ought to hear about, and that I must go up-stairs."

"Ellie," he began—then he caught sight of Abby in the dining-room door. He held out his hand to me. "Come into the study, Ellie, Mr. Dingley wants to ask you a question."

It was all so unexpected and so startling to be called into the study where only men went and only business was talked about; and to hear it was Mr. Dingley, not father, who wished to ask me a question, that I wanted to shrink away and escape from the very facts I had been so anxious to know a few minutes before. But father held me by the hand, and I had to drag my feet down the long dark passage that leads to the study, hearing Mr. Dingley striding at my heels.

It was a small room, full of a great litter of papers, and smelling faintly of tobacco and Russia leather. I sat down in the leather armchair that was drawn up to the table. Just opposite me was a window looking directly into the green branches of a weeping willow; and at intervals the wind blew the leaves against the glass with a sound like "Hush!" Up to that moment I had had no memory connected with that room—only the general sense of awe it had given me as a child. But as soon as I was in that chair, facing that window, hearing the "Hush, hush," of the weeping leaves, in a quick distinct flash I saw myself, a naughty child, sitting up in that chair, in anguish of mind over a stolen jam pot, and my mother's face pulled to great gravity, no doubt to keep from laughing at the sight of me. I seemed to hear her voice again, "The truth, Ellie, remember nothing but good ever comes of the truth."

It flitted through my mind as a little, sweet memory, having nothing to do with what was happening at the moment, for the thought in my mind was all, "What has become of the man with the revolver?"

Father had sat down opposite me on a corner of the table, but Mr. Dingley walked to the fireplace, turned his back to it, put his hands behind his coat-tails, buried his big chin deep in his collar, and in just the same cheerful voice he used when he asked me how many hearts I had broken, "Now, Miss Ellie," he said, "what makes you think that the man who came second out of that door had a revolver in his hand?"

I looked at him in astonishment, his question seemed so silly. "Why, because I saw it."

He gave his head a brisk shake. "Yes, but what makes you know you saw it?"

"Because I heard it strike the ground." I was growing more and more bewildered.

"You heard it strike the ground," Mr. Dingley repeated slowly, "but"— Then with a sudden pouncing forward motion of his head and shoulders, he shot the words at me, "I thought you said he had it in his hand."

"Yes," I stammered, "but that was before."

Mr. Dingley was watching me steadily.

"Now, Miss Ellie, aren't you a little confused on that point?"

I was indeed; but it was his manner that was doing it. He seemed to snatch the words out of my mouth, and turn them into another meaning. "But it was there! you saw it yourselves!" I appealed to him.

Father and Mr. Dingley glanced at each other, and a strange thought came to me with a rush of relief. "Wasn't he dead, had he gone away, didn't you find anything?"

The answering look of their faces made my heart go down like lead. "We found everything as you told us except the revolver. There was no revolver there."

I sat clutching the arms of the chair, staring hard at Mr. Dingley, who seemed suddenly to have become a stranger to me. "Then some one must have picked it up."

"But, Miss Ellie, you say that the street was absolutely deserted when this thing occurred; and when I reached the spot there was a woman looking out of a window, and some laborers running up from Sutter Street, but no one had yet reached the place. Now, how could—"

Father struck in, "No, Jim, you'll only frighten her!" In a lower voice he said something that sounded like, "Not on the stand yet." Then, leaning toward me, across the table, resting on his elbow until his face was level with my own, "I know you must have been much frightened at what you saw, child, and it's possible you may have been a little hysterical, isn't it? It's possible you might have fancied a revolver in his hand, isn't it, when there was none there?"

He said this very slowly and gently, as if he were trying to soothe me, but looking