“Perhaps a half-hour,” she said, at last, and, though outwardly calm, her quickly-drawn breath and shining eyes betokened a suppressed excitement of some sort.

“And you left Mr. Carleton at ten o’clock?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what he did after that?”

“I do not!” the answer rang out clearly, as if Miss Burt were glad to be well past the danger point of the dialogue. But it came back at her with the next question.

“What was the tenor of your conversation with Mr. Carleton in the rose garden?”

At this Dorothy Burt’s calm gave way. She trembled, her red lower lip quivered, and her eyelids fluttered, almost as if she were about to faint.