Nora gave a little gasp, and her hand went to her heart.
"It is horrible," she said.
"While on my second visit to Duncan Street, I was at pains to note one of the nurse's shoes; it was of a peculiarly comfortable make—the same as those which made the prints at the rose arbor.
"These two things rather centered my attention upon her; and I began to pry into her record. Burgess, one of my men, went as far as New Orleans, looking her up. A number of things were found against her, a few rather startling. She seemed a woman given to criminal impulses, and just the sort who would perpetrate a thing such as the Stanwick affair."
"And she had a good face," said Nora. "I had specially noticed it. To think," and the girl shivered, "that she should have been a suicide, locked in her room, when the police came!"
"Fuller made a mistake in waiting when she refused to open the door," said Ashton-Kirk. "He should have broken it in."
"Her story of how the murder was done would have been interesting," said Scanlon.
"I think I can, with Fenton's statement to help out, supply the main points," said the investigator; "but of course they will lack the personal touch. As I have worked it out, she sat reading, just as she said; and she heard a greater part of what was talked of in the sitting-room between Burton and his daughter, and afterward the son. I have learned why the elder Burton went there that night. It was to call up and confer with a shady dealer in diamonds—just such another as Quigley. I have talked with this man. He said he'd had a call from the Bounder, who told him he had a rich haul to dispose of. The time of this call and the time of the Bounder's presence at No. 620 Duncan Street was the same. But the place where they were to meet was never given to the dealer, for the call terminated abruptly in a confusion of voices, and then a blank silence which told him that the receiver had been hung up. I explain this by reasoning it out that young Burton, indignant at what was going forward, had torn his father away from the instrument before the conversation had ended."
"But, if this is so, why did the Bounder ever go to No. 620 Duncan Street to carry out a deal for stolen diamonds?" asked Scanlon. "There were many perfectly safe places he could have picked."
"The answer to that probably lies in the nature of the man. He hated his son and daughter; he knew his rascally doings gave them pain, and it may have occurred to him as a delicious piece of humor to do this particular thing before their eyes, depending upon their shame to keep them silent afterward.