"Still," she persisted shrewdly, "you felt the necessity of proving I'd blackmail—if that's the word you want to use."
"How?" he put in quickly. "Prove it, how?"
"That's why you sent that girl here with the five hundred. I see it now; although, at the time, I didn't." She laughed, a short, bitter note. "Perhaps, the money, or my need of it, kept me from thinking straight."
"Well?"
"Of course," she made the admission calmly, "as soon as I took the hush money, your theory seemed sound—the whole of it: my motives and identity of the murderer."
She was thinking with a concentration so intense that the signs of it resembled physical exertion. Moisture beaded the upper part of her forehead. He could see the muscles of her face respond to the locking of her jaws.
"But there's nothing against me," she began again, and, moved by his expression, qualified: "nothing that I can be held for, in the courts."
"You've decided that, have you?"
"You'll admit it," she said. "There's nothing—there can be nothing—to disprove my statement that Dalton's death was provoked. I hold the key to that—I alone. That being true, I couldn't be prosecuted in Pursuit as 'accessory after the fact.'"
"Yes," he agreed. "That's true."