"It was the senior Stuart's death-bed confession," he said to himself. "What could that dying man have to confess to old Ronald Brooke?"
What but the story of a crime that lay so heavy on his dying hours, that he was fain to seek the pardon of God and of man before he dared go out into the terrible unknown?
Who had dared to wrest that important confession from Mr. Brooke's hand, and strike him dead with the secret unrevealed?
Shuddering, Guy Kenmore asked himself this question to which the answer seemed only too clear.
The only persons who could have been vitally interested in old Clarence Stuart's death-bed confession were his son and his family.
Was Clarence Stuart, junior, a guilty man or a wronged man?
Did he or did he not know of his father's death-bed confession?
By whose hand had that confession been sent to old Ronald Brooke?
Who had followed behind the messenger and torn that document from the old man's hand with a death-blow?
These questions rung unceasingly through Guy Kenmore's head. They sickened him with their terrible suggestions of hidden guilt and crime. He believed more and more that Ronald Brooke had been murdered instead of dying a natural death as his physicians had asserted.