"I don't know."
"Then I will tell you. Cotoner!"
"What?"
Ronald sprang to his feet as pale as death.
"Yes," said Julian Roper, pulling out his pocket-book; "did not a lady of that name come on board the 'Neptune' at Malta?"
"My God!" cried Ronald, madly, "you don't mean to say----"
"We mean to say nothing," answered Foster, quietly; "except that the young lady you know is innocent of this crime."
Ronald gave a kind of strangled sob.
"It is sacrilege even to think of her in connection with it!" he said, in a stifled voice; his young face now haggard with pain. "Why, the Maltese wife was thirty, and Miss Cotoner is only twenty-six! Vassalla, her cousin, was with her all the time she was on board before the ship started. She had no motive for killing Verschoyle. She didn't even know him when I spoke about him."
"Not as Verschoyle, no," from Roper.