“Did you expect to see Miss Van Norman when you entered the house with the latchkey?”

“I did not.”

“And when you entered you discovered the tragedy in the library?”

Schuyler Carleton hesitated. His dry lips quivered and his whole frame shook with intense emotion. “Y-yes,” he stammered.

But the mere fact of that hesitation instantly kindled a spark of suspicion in the minds of some of his hearers. Until that moment Carleton’s excessive agitation had been attributed entirely to his grief at the awful fate which had come to his fiancée; but now, all at once, the man’s demeanor gave an impression of something else.

Could it be guilt?