and pointed a mocking finger at the captain's face, whose whole
expression had changed to one of apprehension.

"What is it?" cried Sylvia. Instinctively she felt that under this
troubled surface some evil thing was stirring, that the issues
perhaps were not quite as simple as she had deemed them.

There was a pause. O'Moy, with his back to the window now, his
hands still clasped behind him, looked mockingly at Tremayne and
waited.

"Why don't you answer her?" he said at last. "You were confidential
enough when I came in. Can it be that you are keeping something
back, that you have secrets from the lady who has no doubt promised
by now to become your wife as the shortest way to mending her recent
folly?"

Tremayne was bewildered. His answer, apparently an irrelevance,
was the mere enunciation of the thoughts O'Moy's announcement had
provoked.

"Do you mean to say that you have known throughout that I did not
kill Samoval?" he asked.

"Of course. How could I have supposed you killed him when I killed
him myself?"

"You? You killed him!" cried Tremayne, more and more intrigued.
And -