Page:Miss Madelyn Mack Detective.pdf/127

Senator's daughter, taken at a fashionable Boston studio, smiled up at me. It was an excellent likeness as I remembered her at the inaugural ball the year before—a wisp of a girl, with a mass of black hair, which served to emphasize her frailness. I studied the picture with a frown. There was a sense of familiarity in its outlines, which certainly our casual meeting could not explain. Then, abruptly, my thoughts flashed back to the crowded courtroom of the afternoon—and I remembered.

In the prisoner's dock I saw again the figure of Beatrice Farragut, slender, fragile, her white face, her somber gown, her eyes fixed like those of a frightened lamb on the jury which was to give her life—or death.

"She poison her husband?" had buzzed the whispered comments at my shoulders during the weary weeks of the trial. "She couldn't harm a butterfly!" Like a mocking echo, the tones of the foreman had sounded the answering verdict of murder—in the first degree. And in New York this meant—

Why had Beatrice Farragut suggested Beth Duffield? Or was it Beth Duffield who had suggested—I crumpled the paper into a heap and tossed it from the window in disgust at my morbid imagination. B-u-r-r-h! And yet they say that a New York newspaper woman has no nerves!