otherwise; and, aside from this, a key was of no use if the night-chain was on. I looked at the heavy brass chain; then I put it in its slot, and opened the door the slight distance that the chain allowed. The opening was barely large enough to admit my hand. There was no possibility of a man getting through that tiny crack, nor could he by any chance put his hand through and slide the chain back; for to remove the chain I had to close the door again, as Charlotte had done this morning.
For the first time I began to feel that I was really facing a terrible situation.
If only I had kept silent about that chain, and if Janet and Charlotte had also failed to mention it, there would have been ample grounds for suspecting that an intruder had come in by the front door.
But realizing myself that the windows had all been secured, and that the chain had been on all night, what possibility was left save the implication of one or both of the only human beings shut inside with the victim?
Bah! There must be other possibilities, no matter how improbable they might be. Perhaps an intruder had come in before the door was chained, and had concealed himself until midnight and then had committed the crime.
But I was forced to admit that he could not have put the chain on the door behind him when he went away.
I even tried this, and, of course, when the door was sufficiently ajar to get my hand through, I could not push the end of the chain back to its socket. The door had to be closed to do this.
With a growing terror at my heart, I reviewed other possibilities. Perhaps the intruder had remained in the house all night, and had slipped away unobserved in the morning.
But he couldn't have gone before Charlotte unchained the door, and since then there had been a crowd of people around constantly.
Still this must have been the way, because there was no other way. Possibly he could have remained in the house over night, and part of the morning, and slipped out during the slight commotion caused by the entrance of the jurymen. But this was palpably absurd, for with the jurors and the officials and the reporters all on watch, besides the doctors and ourselves, it was practically impossible that a stranger could make his escape.
Could he possibly be still concealed in the house? There were many heavy hangings and window curtains where such concealment would be possible, but far from probable. However, I made a thorough search of every curtained window and alcove, of every cupboard, of every available nook or cranny that might possibly conceal an intruder. The fact that the apartment was a duplicate of our own aided me in my search, and when I had finished, I was positive the murderer of Robert Pembroke was not hidden there.
My thoughts seemed baffled at every turn.
There was one other possibility, and, though I evaded it as long as I could, I was at last driven to the consideration of it.
The fact of the securely locked door and windows precluded any entrance of an intruder, unless he had been admitted by one of the three inhabitants of the apartment.
At first I imagined Robert Pembroke having risen and opened the door to some caller, but I immediately dismissed this idea as absurd. For, granting that he had done so, and that the caller had killed him, he could not have relocked the door afterward. This brought me to the thought I had been evading; could Charlotte or—or Janet have let in anybody who, with or without their knowledge, had killed the old man?
It seemed an untenable theory, and yet I infinitely preferred it to a thought of Janet's guilt.
And the worst part of this theory was that in some vague shadowy way it seemed to suggest Leroy.
Lawrence had acted peculiarly when I suggested Leroy's name in connection with our search. Janet had acted strangely whenever I mentioned Leroy; but for that matter, when did Janet not act strangely?
And though my thoughts took no definite shape, though I formed no suspicions and formulated no theories, yet I could not entirely quell a blurred mental picture of Janet opening the door to Leroy, and then—well,—and what then? my imagination flatly refused to go further, and I turned it in another direction.
I couldn't suspect Charlotte. Although she disliked her master, she hadn't sufficient strength of mind to plan or to carry out the deed as it must have been done.
No, it was the work of a bold, unscrupulous nature, and was conceived and executed by an unfaltering hand and an iron will.
And Janet? Had she not shown a side of her nature which betokened unmistakably a strength of will and a stolid sort of determination?
Might she not, in the wakeful hours of the night, have concluded that she could not stand her uncle's tyranny a day longer, and in a sudden frenzy been moved to end it all?
I pushed the thought from me, but it recurred again and again.
Her demeanor that morning, I was forced to admit, was what might have been expected, had she been guilty. Her swooning fits, alternating with those sudden effects of extreme haughtiness and bravado, were just what one might expect from a woman of her conflicting emotions.
That she had a temper similar in kind, if not in degree, to her late uncle's, I could not doubt; that she was impulsive, and could be irritated even to frenzy, I did not doubt; and yet I loved her, and I did not believe her guilty.
This was probably cause and effect, but never would I believe the girl responsible in any way for the crime until she told me so herself. But could she have been an accessory thereto, or could she have caused or connived at it? Could I imagine her so desperate at her hard lot as to—but pshaw! what was the use of imagining? If, as I had often thought, I had even a slight detective ability, why not search for other clues that must exist, and that would, at least, give me a hint as to which direction I might look for the criminal?
Determined, then, to find something further I went to Mr. Pembroke's bedroom. There I found Inspector Crawford on his hands and knees, still searching for the broken end of the hat-pin.
But, though we both went over every inch of the floor and furniture, nothing could be found that could be looked upon as a clue of any sort.
"Of course," I observed, "the intruder carried the end of the pin away with him, after he broke it off."
"What are you talking about?" almost snarled the inspector. "An intruder is a physical impossibility. Even the skeleton man from the museum couldn't slide through a door that could open only three inches. And, too, men don't wear hat-pins. It is a woman's weapon."
Chapter XII.
Janet Is Our Guest
Ah, so the blow had fallen! He definitely suspected Janet, and, besides the point of evidence, opportunity, he condemned her in his own mind because a hat-pin pointed to a woman's work. He didn't tell me this in so many words—he didn't have to. I read from his face, and from his air of finality, that he was convinced of Janet's guilt, either with or without Charlotte's assistance.
And I must admit, that in all my thought and theory, in all my imagination and visioning, in all my conclusions and deductions, I had entirely lost sight of the weapon, and of the fact that the Inspector stated so tersely, that it was a woman's weapon. It was a woman's weapon, and it suddenly seemed to me that all my carefully built air-castles went crashing down beneath the blow!
"Well," I said, "Inspector, if you can't find the other half of the pin, it seems to me to prove that an intruder not only came in, but went away again, carrying that tell-tale pin-head with him,—or with her, if you prefer it. I suppose there are other women in the world, beside the lady you are so unjustly suspecting, and I suppose, too, if an intruder succeeded in getting in here, it might equally well have been a woman as a man."
Inspector Crawford growled an inaudible reply, but I gathered that he did not agree with me in any respect.
"And