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Agnes screamed. “I saw him take something and rub it on her lips, and the brightness went away. I–I didn’t mean to tell, but, God help me, I must.”

“Saw whom?” demanded Kennedy, fixing her eye as he had when he had called her back from aphasia.

“Him–Millefleur–Miller,” she sobbed, shrinking back as if the very confession appalled her.

“Yes,” added Kennedy coolly, “Miller did try to remove the traces of the poison after he discovered it, in order to protect himself and the reputation of the Novella.”

The telephone bell tinkled. Craig seized the receiver.

“Yes, Barron, this is Kennedy. You received the impulses all right? Good. And have you had time to study the records? Yes? What’s that? Number seven? All right. I’ll see you very soon and go over the records again with you. Good-bye.”

“One word more,” he continued, now facing us. “The normal heart traces its throbs in regular rhythm. The diseased or overwrought heart throbs in degrees of irregularity that vary according to the trouble that affects it, both organic and emotional. The expert like Barron can tell what each wave means, just as he can tell what the lines in a spectrum mean. He can see the invisible, hear the inaudible, feel the intangible, with mathematical precision. Barron has now read the electro-cardiograms. Each is a picture of the beating of the heart that made it, and each smallest variation has a meaning to him. Every passion, every emotion, every disease, is recorded with inexorable truth. The person with murder in his heart cannot hide it from the string galvanometer, nor can that person who wrote the false note in which the very lines of the letters betray a diseased heart hide that disease. The doctor tells me that that person was number–“

Mrs. Collins had risen wildly and was standing before us with blazing eyes. “Yes,” she cried, pressing her hands on her breast as if it were about to burst and tell the secret before her lips could frame the words, “yes, I killed her, and I would follow her to the end of the earth if I had not succeeded. She was there, the woman who had stolen from me what was more than life itself. Yes, I wrote the note, I poisoned the envelope. I killed her.”

All the intense hatred that she had felt for that other woman in the days that she had vainly striven to equal her in beauty and win back her husband’s love broke forth. She was wonderful, magnificent, in her fury. She was passion personified; she was fate, retribution.

Collins looked at his wife, and even he felt the spell. It was not crime that she had done; it was elemental justice.

For a moment she stood, silent, facing Kennedy. Then the colour slowly faded from her cheeks. She reeled.

Colling caught her and imprinted a kiss, the kiss that for years she had longed and striven for again. She looked rather than spoke forgiveness as he held her and showered them on her.

“Before Heaven,” I heard him whisper into her ear, “with all my power as a lawyer I will free you from this.”

Gently Dr. Leslie pushed him aside and felt her pulse as she dropped limply into the only easy chair in the laboratory.

“O’Connor,” he said at length, “all the evidence that we really have hangs on an invisible thread of quartz a mile away. If Professor Kennedy agrees, let us forget what has happened here to- night. I will direct my jury to bring in a verdict of suicide. Collins, take good care of her.” He leaned over and whispered so she could not hear. “I wouldn’t promise her six weeks otherwise.”

I could not help feeling deeply moved as the newly reunited Collinses left the laboratory together. Even the bluff deputy, O’Connor, was touched by it and under the circumstances did what seemed to him his higher duty with a tact of which I had believed him scarcely capable. Whatever the ethics of the case, he left it entirely to Dr. Leslie’s coroner’s jury to determine.