"I've been thinking it over," he admitted quietly, "and I guess it is up to you and me to find out what this means."
"Yes, sir," hesitatingly. "You—you don't think it was Miss
Natalie, sir?"
"No, I do not, Sexton. I have my own reasons for saying that. Yet naturally she is the one to be first suspected. Do you know anything?"
"Only that I am sure she was in the garden, sir, when the shot was fired.
I saw her there just after you drove away."
"That is conclusive then, so far as her personal actions are concerned. But there is an odd angle to this matter, and I might as well explain it to you first as last. Perhaps you can help figure the oddness out. I was not engaged to Miss Natalie, Sexton; I was not even a friend. I came to the house, employed to perform a certain task. She introduced me as her fiancé merely to explain my presence there, and make the way clear. It was the impulse of a moment."
"You don't say, sir! What, may I ask, was it you was expected to do?"
"To discover who was masquerading in this city under her name."
"Was there some one, sir?"
"So she told me; we went into that rather thoroughly. She claimed it had been going on for some months; checks had been cashed at the bank; even her servants had been approached by some one so closely resembling her as to deceive them; and she had been reported at various places she never visited. She was very much exercised over it."
"And she engaged you just to find this other woman?"