The matter of the bottles was gone into and the event in Cuthbert Road.

Then I was called to the stand, and my testimony asked for.
I had prepared myself for the ordeal and faced it unflinchingly.

That I might keep intact the one point necessary to Carmel's safety, I met my inquisitors, now as before, with the utmost candour in all other respects.

Indeed, in one particular I was even more exact in my details than at any previous examination.

Anxious to explain my agitated and hesitating advance through the club-house, prior to my discovery of the crime which had been committed there, I acknowledged what I had hitherto concealed, that in my first entrance into the building, I had come upon a man's derby hat and coat hanging in the lower hall, and when questioned more minutely on the subject, allowed it to appear that it was owing to the disappearance of these articles during my stay upstairs, that I had been led into saying that some one had driven away from The Whispering Pines before the coming of the police.
This, as you will see, was in open contradiction of my former statements that I had _seen_ an unknown party, thus attired, driving away through the upper gateway just as I entered by the lower.