“Quite all right, thanks,” Whittaker answered with equal stiffness. “Won’t you come in?”

“No. Not now. There’s too much in the affrighted air. Get some sleep if you can. Though perhaps you think you’ll get plenty of that soon enough. Well, you’ve started the ball rolling with a vengeance, haven’t you? Satisfied? God, Whittaker, hadn’t you better cry quits? It isn’t too late. Tell ’em it was a practical joke; and ask Crawford’s pardon on the side. You see for yourself it isn’t going to be so daisy simple. A murder! We’ll be lucky if it’s only half a dozen. There was no lovelight in any one’s eyes this evening, except in that poor little goose of a Joel’s. And she went upstairs looking withered. Slice this house from garret to cellar right now and it would make as pretty a Desire Under the Elms cross-section as you could find in a day’s journey.”

“The desire being to get me, huh?” Whittaker asked grimly.

“Exactly. If only whoever gets you would just please make a thorough job of it. Who do you think tried it?”

“Haven’t a ghost; have you? Thought it was going to be the Colonel somehow. But the blow didn’t quite come from his direction. Still, he may have swung around me in the dark. It was a nasty knock, I think with metal, but glancing. That’s what saved me.”

“Whittaker, you are a cool one. Wish I could match you tonight. But there are moments when I don’t like it. Change your mind?”

“Never! No, as I said before, if you don’t like the game, get out. I’ll find a detective to whom it will be a challenge to the best work that’s in him.”

“And I will never get out. You know that; you know it only too well, you old reprobate. Filthy as the weather looks ahead, catch me refusing to go through it, if it’s there to go through. Well, while we linger here the plot undoubtedly thickens. I’d best get a move-on. Good-by—for the moment.”

“Good-by, and good-hunting,” Whittaker said as he turned away, leaning more heavily on John’s arm. Closing his door he murmured “Ah!” on a breath, meaning, if he had troubled to say all he meant, “Well, well, see what we have here.”

Romany Video, in a great fluff of feathery negligee, lay face downward, a vibrant, hysterical puff-ball, on the bed. She was a mere speck of worried humanity troubling the white waste spaces of Whittaker’s four-poster; but an insistent speck, like a mosquito at a screen. Whittaker regarded her for a moment with an expression of mingled amusement, pity, contempt, and the faintly suggestive what-can-I-do-for-you look certain men always have for a fair damsel in distress. Thoroughly as Whittaker knew this particular damsel, no distress of hers would quite leave him indifferent.

But he took his time. There was no harm ever came in letting a woman wait—or weep. He said nothing. Sitting on the edge of the bed, as though Romany were not there, he let John help him exchange his pair of patent-leather for a pair of pigskin slippers, remove his dinner-coat and stiff shirt, and slip his green silk dressing-gown over his shoulders. Romany, properly responsive to the delayed attention, redoubled her sobbing.

“Thank you, John. That’ll do for now. No, don’t bother about my head. It’s hardly more than a mean bruise. I’ll call you later if I want you. Good-night.”

Whittaker, allowing John to depart, silently studied the trembling, haired-up curls of Romany’s dishevelled head. Then, on the click of the latch, he leaned across and touched her arm.

“Come, come, little one. What’s it all about? You’re taking it too hard. I’m sorry it had to be Crawford to begin with—for your sake. But you’ll get over him, if you have time, as you got over me. As you got over Blake. How did Blake let you get over him?”

“Oh, go away, you horrid, mean thing. I can’t bear you. Don’t talk to me. Don’t you dare touch me.”

“As bad as all that? Dear, dear! You’re taking him harder than you took most of us. You like them good, is that it? Gives you something to do making them over.”

“You bad man! How can you say such things to me? How can you, after all we’ve been to each other? You used never to do anything to hurt me. And look at you now. What has happened, Bertrand dear? It’s such a cruel world. I can’t bear it. I tell you, I can’t. I’m going to kill myself. I’m going to die, Bertrand.”

“My dear, for the first time of the hundred and one you’ve made that threat, there’s a chance of it’s coming off,” Whittaker said, and said the one thing in creation that, instead of aggravating them, could have stopped Romany’s hysterics dead in their tracks. Romany was quiet; desperately quiet. She lifted her head from the foam of maribou and looked at Whittaker with wide, distraught eyes, and parted lips.

“What do you mean?” she whispered.

“What I say,” he mocked her whisper by imitating it. “Even if you escape tonight, Romany (for death, whose name you so often take in vain, is on the qui vive in the house tonight), you have Durian’s death to answer for.”

Romany screamed, and throttled the scream with her hand across her mouth.

“Bertrand! You are going—to tell—that? You’ve written it down as you wrote about Neil?”

“I have.”

“Oh, no-no-no-no. Please, no. I don’t believe it.”

“Then wait and see. But hope isn’t dead yet, Freckles. (Let me see; yes, there’s your one freckle that made me call you Freckles. Remember?) I’ll have to find the Diary, or rewrite it,—unless, of course, I—”