But who could he have imagined had supplanted him? The answer came even as the question formed itself in his mind. Brewster! Richard Brewster had called on Leila the following night to ask about his own wife’s affair. Could Storm have returned early and in secret and found him there? Brewster’s office was in the Leicester Building, too; George had called there on him more than once. Why, the thing was as clear as day!
Storm and Leila must have had a fearful scene in the den after Brewster’s departure, and the culmination must have come with that swift, awful blow which laid her dead at her husband’s feet! But with what weapon had that blow been struck?
George closed his eyes, shuddering, and visualized the room which was as familiar to him as his own. It contained nothing which could have been put effectively to such a foul use. Even the poker had been removed from the fireplace when it had been banked with ferns for the spring.
Horton might have been killed—and probably was—by the blow from a heavy cane, but there was none in the den——
The golf sticks! They had been lying there across the den table where he had found them to-night. Storm’s oath when George had brought them here to the library a few hours ago, his gesture of horror and repulsion, his cry to take them out of his sight, that he should never play again—how comprehensible it all was now!
All but overcome with the horror of the thought, George went silently out into the hall, gathered up the sticks and returned to the library. As he did so a bestial, raucous snore drifted down from above, and for a minute the very soul of him shook with the longing to rush up the stairs and destroy with his bare hands the vile thing which lay there. The years of friendship were gone wholly now, blotted by his hideous knowledge of the truth. The Norman Storm whom he had known had vanished; indeed, had never existed. In his stead this dissembling creature with a murderer’s black heart had walked among men, free until this hour!
Trembling, George laid the sticks one by one across the couch and examined them. No mid-iron could have struck that blow; it would have crashed through the temple and left a frightful, gaping, ragged wound. It must have been something round and smooth, not unlike the brass knob on the fender, since the doctor and coroner had both been easily deceived. Not the putter nor the brassie nor the cleek,—the driver! George picked it up and carried it close to one of the candles. Could it be that he really saw a faint tinge of brown upon its hardwood knob?
He laid it aside with a sigh and started once more his restless pacing up and down, as his thoughts returned to the events immediately following Leila’s death, from the moment when he himself had been summoned to the house.
No wonder Storm had collapsed in the presence of Richard and Julie Brewster. They had all unconsciously revealed to him his wife’s innocence of the sin for which he had taken her life. It had been not grief alone, but remorse which struck him down! What credulous fools they had all been not to have seen the truth!
A confirming memory came to him of Storm’s manner when he awakened from his drugged sleep on the following morning. How anxious he had been to know what he had said during his unconsciousness! That was an effort to learn if he had betrayed himself. How they had all played into his hands!