A week of June had passed.
The trees were in full leaf, and the scent of flowering shrubbery was in the air.
I remember thinking that it would soon be two months since Sarah had been murdered, and that Florence had been dead for more than a month.
And what did we know now, more than we knew then?
Almost nothing.
That Sarah had known Florence, that they had shared the knowledge of the will, and that Sarah had hidden two pages of a record which were being diligently sought by some one unknown!
Cleared of all extraneous matter, that was our case.
We might suspect that Howard had been murdered, but we did not know it.
We might believe Judy had been attacked, but had the ladder possibly fallen, after all?
Had Joseph tumbled down the stairs?
And had Dick surprised some venial malefactor who had simply pushed him out of the way?
And was the answer of the Grand Jury the correct one?
Was it, after all, as simple as that, that Jim had killed Sarah to get the duplicate will, trusting to luck—and possibly Katherine—to get hold of the other?
I daresay I walked slowly, for it was after nine o’clock when I rang the door bell.
Almost at once it was opened and Lily Sanderson slid out on the step, closing the door behind her.
“Well, wouldn’t you know it?” she said.
“The husband’s come to see her!
He’s up there now, and the daughter too, and there’s been all sorts of a row.
She’ll be upset, and it’s bad for her.
It might even kill her.”
I saw that she was crying, and I realized that her tears were not for me and my disappointment; that for a little time she had fed her starved womanhood on service, and that she had developed an affection for this unfortunate woman who had become for the time at least her child.
“You need sleep,” I said.
“Let the daughter stay tonight, and go to bed.”
But she shook her head. She had stepped into the vestibule and drawn me in with her.
“Look here,” she said in a low voice, “what do you suppose the fuss is about?
She’s sick, and he knows it.
Why is he jawing her?
Is he afraid she’ll tell something?”
“Who is he?
What does he look like?”
“I never saw him, and I don’t want to.”
But she caught something in my face—we were in the vestibule, and there was a little light—and she turned swiftly and went into the house.
She was back again almost immediately, her finger on her lips.
“He’s coming down,” she whispered.
“Don’t move.”
She had partially closed the door behind her, and we stood there waiting, while the man slowly descended to the second floor.
Still as it was on that by-street, his movements were amazingly quiet.
Indeed, had I not been told that some one was descending that staircase, I would not have believed it.
A creak now and then, the indescribable faint sounds of a moving body, were all I could hear.
Then, part way down the second flight he stopped.
Evidently he had seen the partly opened door, and was looking at it.
Lily Sanderson’s face was curious in that half light.
It was as though that descent, harmless enough until then, had become sinister.
She stared at me, her mouth partly open, and thus we stood for an absurd time, waiting for the man on the stairs to make the first move.
Suddenly the tension became too much for her.
She made an odd little sound and threw open the door.
There was no man on the stairs, nobody in sight.
She looked profoundly shocked, and she gave a sort of hysterical giggle.
“Can you beat that?” she whispered.
“He went back!”