"Fuller," said Ashton-Kirk. But he had no need to speak, for that brisk young man was already after her. Dazed, Bat Scanlon looked about. Nora was upon her knees beside the sick girl, sobbing and chafing her pale hands; the investigator was at a telephone summoning the police. Scanlon's glance then wandered to Fenton, and there rested.
"You told us a couple of hours ago," said he, "that a woman killed Tom Burton and that you saw her do it. Has he," and he nodded toward Quigley, "got it on the right party?"
"Yes," replied the broken-nosed man, "he's got it right; it was the nurse. You don't have to look any further than that."
"But," said Bat, a last doubt in his mind, "what was the idea of you wanting to go up-stairs a while ago, if you didn't want her?" pointing to Mary.
"It was the sparks I wanted," said Fenton. "I thought if any were left they were in the nurse's room."
Next morning Nora Cavanaugh, still very pale, but with a light in her eyes such as had not been there for many days, sat snugly in the corner of a sofa at her home, wrapped about in a beautiful old shawl. Near by sat Bat Scanlon; and standing before them, his hat and stick in his hand as though about to leave, was Ashton-Kirk.
"I'll admit," the big athlete was saying, "when the thing was finally brought down to a woman and Nora was eliminated," with a smiling nod toward her, "I could see nobody but Mary Burton. The nurse never occurred to me."
"And yet you seem to have suspected her from the start," said Nora, her eyes wonderingly on the criminologist. "Why was that?"
"It began with the candlestick—the weapon used in the commission of the murder. Candlesticks go in pairs, usually. I found the mate to it on a shelf in the room across the hall from the sitting-room—that in which the nurse sat reading when Tom Burton was admitted to the house. That one of a pair of candlesticks should be in the sitting-room, and one in the room opposite, struck me as being unusual; later, I spoke to the maid of this. She said they both belonged in the room—on the shelf—where I found the second one."