"You—what?" Her eyes were large, incredulous. "You know that it was I who—who killed Simon Varr?" Amazed, she saw him nod his head, and flinched from the gesture as if it were a blow. "How did you learn that?"
"A score of things pointed to it from the first," he answered miserably. "I would have seen the truth long since if—if something else had not blinded me to it. This morning my eyes were finally opened—" he fumbled in his pocket with shaking fingers—"by these!"
Miss Ocky took the two telegrams, held them shoulder-high to the light, and read them wonderingly. She exclaimed sharply over the one from Kitty Doyle.
"'K. Doyle'! Who is that?"
"A clever woman detective accompanying Janet Mackay—not to New Orleans, but to Montreal! I already knew her destination before you attempted to mislead me."
"A detective following Janet!" Her tone was a vigorous protest. "Oh, you must call her back! It isn't fair to Janet! Promise me you will call her back!"
"I will, at once. Kitty Doyle's usefulness there—is ended!"
She had raised herself slightly in her eagerness; now she relaxed again with a sigh of relief. Creighton, a dull ache in his heart, waited for her to resume the conversation. He would not take the lead.
"So Janet talked in her sleep!" To his horror, Miss Ocky was speaking in her amused, faintly mocking accents as though nothing mattered less than this gruesome discussion of how she came to be exposed. "In a Pullman, too; how very indiscreet! I should have foreseen that and made her stick to day coaches. I knew her failing!"
"It was a paragraph in one of your books that revealed it to me," contributed Creighton gloomily. "You once described a bad night you spent due to your companion talking in her sleep. That enabled me to give my operative a tip."