For he must have done it! Here was the evidence of the outer sheets of the newspapers, with the apartment number scrawled upon them to corroborate the police theory as to why they had been removed; and every fact, known and surmised, bore out the hideous truth!
Why had he killed Horton? The obvious reason, of course, was the possession of the money, but although his capital must have been swept away if he had really been duped by the swindler, he had still his comfortable income in a life-long sinecure. Only desperate men kill, but why was Storm desperate? To get away?
Surely that mere impulse would not have been strong enough to force him to murder! What had he to get away from? Only grief-stricken memories of his dead wife; and other men lived down such sorrow. Grief alone could not drive a man from his assured place in the world to become a wanderer in strange lands, a self-exiled pariah! Nothing but the consciousness of guilt could do that, and the fear of retributive justice; but Storm had been guiltless of anything then. George could well imagine his desire to flee the country after Horton was found with his head crushed in—
So, too, had Leila died! George sprang from his chair with both clenched fists raised above his head. She, too, had been found with her head crushed, as though by the blow of some heavy, blunt instrument!
But, no! No! He was going crazy! Poor Leila had suffered an attack of petit mal, she had fallen and struck her head on that rounded brass knob of the fender! But had she? Storm had told him that Dr. Carr had advanced that theory, but George recalled in a sickening wave of horror that the doctor himself had unconsciously contradicted that statement when he was called hurriedly to attend Storm on the night after the funeral; after the visit of the Brewsters with their confession, when Storm had broken down for the first time.
Carr had said then that it was Storm who suggested the accidental cause of Leila’s death, but George had been too worried and upset to note the discrepancy at the time.
It could not be! It was too vile, too impossible! He was letting his mind run away with him! What cause could Storm have had to kill the thing he loved best in all the world? Leila had been a perfect wife, their happiness was unalloyed. Men only did such a fearful thing in a fit of jealous rage or madness, and Leila had been the last woman in the world——
Then the Brewster’s visit recurred to him once more, and Leila’s little white lie which he himself had called forth. And then, without warning, that almost forgotten scene of the morning on the down-town street, before the entrance to the Leicester Building to which he had been a wholly inadvertent witness flashed before his mental vision as though thrown upon a screen, and the whole truth was revealed.
George cowered back aghast as from the mouth of a yawning abyss, but he could not deny what his inmost soul confirmed.
Storm could not have learned of her birthday surprise for him. His face as George had seen it from across the street had revealed utter stupefaction at seeing his wife issue from the Leicester Building. Then that same evening on the veranda when Leila denied having been in town for weeks and told that palpable falsehood about lunch at the Ferndale Inn: what murderous demon must have entered his breast with the jealous conviction that his wife was deceiving him! George knew his pride, his swift, uncontrollable passion; the thought must have been like a white-hot iron searing his brain!