To his awakened imagination, there was a breathless suggestion in it--a suggestion which it was his foremost wish, just now, to understand.
And those pines--gaunt, restless, communicative! ready with their secret, if one could only interpret their language.

How their heads came together as their garrulous tongues repeated the tale, which would never grow old to them until age nipped their hoary heads and laid them low in the dust, with their horror half expressed, their gruesome tale unfinished.
"Witnesses of it all," commented the young detective as he watched the swaying boughs rising and dipping before a certain window.

"They were peering into that room long before Clarke stole the glimpse which has undone the unfortunate Ranelagh.

If I had their knowledge, I'd do something more than whisper." Thus musing, thus muttering, he plodded up the road, his insignificant figure an unpromising break in the monotonous white of the wintry landscape.

But could the prisoner who had indirectly speeded this young detective on his present course, have read his thoughts and rightly estimated the force of his purpose, would he have viewed with so much confidence the entrance of this unprepossessing stranger upon the no-thoroughfare into which his own carefully studied admissions had blindly sent him?
As has been said before, this road was an outlying one and but little travelled save in the height of summer.