To attempt to fathom such a nature as this leads to little but mental confusion. Before I had spent a half-hour in trying to untangle the knotty problem offered by Leighton Gillespie's opposing characteristics, I decided to follow the example of my friend Underhill, and keep to facts.
These in themselves were startling enough to occupy my mind and convince me absolutely of Leighton's guilt. But this was not convincing Miss Meredith. Probabilities, possibilities even, which might satisfy me, would count for but little with her. With her nice sense of justice, she would demand a positive and unbroken chain of evidence before she would allow herself to acknowledge the guilt of the man whose innocence I presumed to challenge, and this clear and unbroken chain I did not have. How, then, could I strengthen the evidence just obtained? Not by showing motive. There seemed to be no motive. To be sure, Leighton was in debt, -- so were they all, -- and he was known to have quarrelled bitterly with his father more than once. But these were not new facts, nor were they sufficiently condemnatory to settle, even in her mind, the torturing question embodied in that one word already alluded to: which?
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