Burton's eyes were drawn to Leslie's face. She was looking at her father with a passion of pity and sympathy that was more eloquently expressed through her silence than by any words. Mrs. Underwood broke the silence with her judicial speech.

"I do not think," she said, "that there has ever been anything in your treatment of your patients that would at all justify the idea that you poisoned Mr. Means. Therefore, you can rest assured that the story will do you no harm. We really can suffer only from our own acts."

Underwood opened his eyes and looked at Burton with portentous gravity.

"We'll consider that matter settled, then. Sometime I should like to lay the details of that affair before you, Mr. Burton, because you would understand the wild absurdity of it all. As a matter of fact, strychnine in fatal quantities was found in the bottle of medicine which I made up myself, and I have not the slightest idea who could have tampered with it. Some one had. That is one of the mysteries which Leslie wants to fit in with the others of the series. But we haven't time for that now, for my committee is almost due, and I am going to ask you to help me back to the surgery. I will meet them there."

"One moment," said Burton. "You surely must have laid these matters before the police. Did they make no discoveries, have no theories?"

Underwood glanced at his daughter,--plainly and obviously a glance of warning. But he spoke in his habitually easy way.

"Oh, Selby has put it before the police," he said. "As I understand it, he has been neglecting his business to labor with the police by day and by night, trying to induce them to arrest me. It strike me that he is becoming something of a monomaniac on the subject, but I may be prejudiced."

"I didn't mean the recent hold-up, but those earlier affairs," explained Burton. "Didn't the police investigate them?"

"Our police force has fallible moments, and this proved to be one of them. They chased all over the place, like unbroken dogs crazy over a scent, ran many theories to earth, and proved nothing," said the doctor in an airy tone, as one dismissing a subject of no moment.

But Mrs. Underwood looked down the table toward Burton and spoke with her disconcerting and inopportune candor.

"They tried to make out that it was Henry," she said calmly. "I think I may say, without being 

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