"Mine."

"Do you know the locket?"

"I gave it to a woman named Louise Rosser five or six years ago."

"My wife."

"Yes, she was crazy in love with me but—"

With diabolic malice Armstrong left the sentence uncompleted. The inference he meant should be drawn from his reticence was obvious.

"I took it from her dead body," gritted out Newbold.

"She was beside herself with love for me, an old affair, you know," said Armstrong more explicitly, thinking to use a spear with a double barb to pierce the woman's and the man's heart alike. That he defamed the dead was of no moment then. "She wanted to leave you," he ran on glibly, "she wanted me to take her back and—"

"Untrue," burst forth from Enid Maitland's lips. "A slanderous, dastardly, cowardly untruth."

But the men paid no attention to her in their excitement, perhaps they did not even hear her. Newbold thrust his pistol violently forward.