With a restraint marked as it was impressive, Mr. Mansell looked at the District Attorney for a moment, and then said:
“You speak of proof. Now, what proof have you to give that I put up, as you call it, for a night, or even for an hour, in the hut which stands in the woods back of my aunt’s house?”
“This,” was Mr. Ferris’ reply. “It is known you were in the woods the afternoon previous to the assault upon your aunt, because you were seen there in company with a young lady with whom you were holding a tryst. Did you speak, sir?”
“No!” was the violent, almost disdainful, rejoinder.
“You did not sleep at your aunt’s, for her rooms contained not an evidence of having been opened for a guest, while the hut revealed more than one trace of having been used as a dormitory. I could even tell you where you cut the twigs of hemlock that served you for a pillow, and point to the place where you sat when you scribbled over the margin of the Buffalo Courier with a blue pencil, such as that I now see projecting from your vest pocket.”
“It is not necessary,” replied the young man, heavily frowning. Then with another short glance at Mr. Ferris, he again demanded:
“What is your reason for stating I visited my aunt’s house on the morning she was murdered? Did anyone see me do it? or does the house, like the hut, exhibit traces of my presence there at that particular time?”
There was irony in his tone, and a disdain almost amounting to scorn in his wide-flashing blue eyes; but Mr. Ferris, glancing at the hand clutched about the railing of the desk, remarked quietly:
“You do not wear the diamond ring you carried away with you from the tryst I mentioned? Can it be that the one which was picked up after the assault, on the floor of Mrs. Clemmens’ dining-room, could have fallen from your finger, Mr. Mansell?”
A start, the first this powerfully repressed man had given, showed that his armor of resistance had been pierced at last.
“How do you know,” he quickly asked, “that I carried away a diamond ring from the tryst you speak of?”
“Circumstances,” returned the District Attorney, “prove it beyond a doubt. Miss Dare—”
“Miss Dare!”
Oh, the indescribable tone of this exclamation! Mr. Byrd shuddered as he heard it, and looked at Mr. Mansell with a new feeling, for which he had no name.
“Miss Dare,” repeated the District Attorney, without, apparently, regarding the interruption, “acknowledges she returned you the ring which you endeavored at that interview to bestow upon her.”
“Ah!” The word came after a moment’s pause. “I see the case has been well worked up, and it only remains for me to give you such explanations as I choose to make. Sir,” declared he, stepping forward, and bringing his clenched hand down upon the desk at which Mr. Ferris was sitting, “I did not kill my aunt. I admit that I paid her a visit. I admit that I stayed in the woods back of her house, and even slept in the hut, as you have said; but that was on the day previous to her murder, and not after it. I went to see her for the purpose of again urging the claims of my invention upon her. I went secretly, and by the roundabout way you describe, because I had another purpose in visiting Sibley, which made it expedient for me to conceal my presence in the town. I failed in my efforts to enlist the sympathies of my aunt in regard to my plans, and I failed also in compassing that other desire of my heart of which the ring you mention was a token. Both failures unnerved me, and I lay in that hut all night. I even lay there most of the next morning; but I did not see my aunt again, and I did not lift my hand against her life.”
There was indescribable quiet in the tone, but there was indescribable power also, and the look he levelled upon the District Attorney was unwaveringly solemn and hard.
“You deny, then, that you entered the widow’s house on the morning of the murder?”
“I do.”
“It is, then, a question of veracity between you and Miss Dare?”
Silence.
“She asserts she gave you back the ring you offered her. If this is so, and that ring was in your possession after you left her on Monday evening, how came it to be in the widow’s dining-room the next morning, if you did not carry it there?”
“I can only repeat my words,” rejoined Mr. Mansell.
The District Attorney replied impatiently. For various reasons he did not wish to believe this man guilty.
“You do not seem very anxious to assist me in my endeavors to reach the truth,” he observed. “Cannot you tell me what you did with the ring after you left Miss Dare? Whether you put it on your finger, or thrust it into your pocket, or tossed it into the marsh? If you did not carry it to the house, someone else must have done so, and you ought to be able to help us in determining who.”
But Mr. Mansell shortly responded:
“I have nothing to say about the ring. From the moment Miss Dare returned it to me, as you say, it was, so far as I am concerned, a thing forgotten. I do not know as I should ever have thought of it again, if you had not mentioned it to me today. How it vanished from my possession only to reappear upon the scene of murder, some more clever conjurer than myself must explain.”
“And this is all you have to say, Mr. Mansell?”
“This is all I have to say.”
“Byrd,” suggested the District Attorney, after a long pause, during which the subject of his suspicions had stood before him as rigid and inscrutable as a statue in
