I had scarcely finished my supper, when the door bell
rang, and to my astonishment the Mayor of Grunau was announced,
accompanied by the same Police Commissioner who had visited me
in my office that morning. The Mayor was an old friend of mine
and his deeply grave face showed me that something serious had
occurred. It was indeed serious! and for some minutes I could
not grasp the meaning of the commissioner's questions. Finally I
realised with a tremendous shock that I--I myself was under
suspicion of the murder of John Siders. The description given by
the old servant of the man who had visited Siders the evening
before, the very clothes that I wore, my hat and the trousers
spotted by the purple ink, led to my identification as this
mysterious visitor. The servant had let me in but she had not
seen me go out.
"Then I discovered--when confronted suddenly with my own revolver
which had been found on the floor of the room, some distance from
the body of the dead man, that this same revolver had been identified
as mine by my ward, Eleonora Roemer, who had been to the police
station at G-- in the early afternoon hours. Some impulse of loyalty
to her dead lover, some foolish feminine fear that I might have
spoken against him in my earlier interviews with the commissioner
had driven the girl to this step. A few questions sufficed to draw
from her the story of her secret engagement, of its ending, and of
my quarrel with John.
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