"That was my impulse, I admit, when you told me about the cigars. I hardly knew what else I could do."
"You are very fond of Foster?"
"I am very fond of Alice."
Garrison was glad. He could even have been jealous of a brother.
"But how could Foster have tampered with your cigars?" he inquired.
"Was he up there at Hickwood when you left them?"
"He was there all the time of uncle's visit, in hiding, and even on the night of his death," she confessed in a whisper. "Alice doesn't know of this, but he admitted it all to me."
"This is what you have been trying to conceal from me, all the time,"
Garrison observed. "Do the Robinsons have their suspicions?"
"I can't be certain. Perhaps they have. Theodore has exercised a very bad influence on Foster's life. He intimated once to me that perhaps Uncle John had been murdered."
Garrison thought for a moment.
"It is almost impossible for anyone to have had that suspicion who had no guilty knowledge," he said. "Theodore was, and is, capable of any crime. If he knew about the will and believed you had not fulfilled the conditions, by marrying, he would have had all the motive in the world to commit the crime himself."