"Tell me!" she panted. "Tell me! I can stand it! Oh, you foolish man, didn't you see—I was trying to nerve myself—I was trying to find out...."
I caught the hands that were bruising themselves against each other and held them fast.
"Miss Vaughan," I said, "listen to me and believe that I am telling you the whole truth. The coroner's jury returned a verdict that Swain was guilty of your father's death. As the result of that verdict, he has been taken to the Tombs. But the last words he said to me before the officers took him away were that he was innocent, and that he had no fear."
"Surely," she assented, eagerly, "he should have no fear. But to think of him in prison—it tears my heart!"
"Don't think of it that way!" I protested. "He is bearing it bravely—when I saw him last, he was smiling."
"But the stain—the disgrace."
"There will be none; he shall be freed without stain—I will see to that."
"But I cannot understand," she said, "how the officers of the law could blunder so."
"All of the evidence against him," I said, "was purely circumstantial, except in one particular. He was in the grounds at the time the murder was committed; your father had quarrelled with him, and it was possible that he had followed you and your father to the house, perhaps not knowing clearly what he was doing, and that another quarrel had occurred. But that amounted to nothing. Young men like Swain, even when half-unconscious, don't murder old men by strangling them with a piece of curtain-cord. To suppose that Swain did so would be absurd, but for one thing—no, for two things."
"What are they?" she demanded.