Gruin followed him from the library up to the second floor of the big house. And as he moved, some unseen thing seemed to move beside him. Very softly, almost furtively, the clicking tapped in rhythm with his step. They got to Gruin's suite, a big bedroom and bath and a small den, on the second floor. And there the old man pointed. He pointed toward a great leather chair by a flat-topped desk. There was nothing in the chair. Gruin turned with a puzzled frown to his grandfather. And then, without going to the chair, he caught the odor that emanated from it--a faint perfume that filled the den--an odor of hyacinth. Maria José had always used that scent. Hyacinth. "Some woman has been in this room," the old man accused sternly. "The scent proves it. And her name was Maria. _That_, scribbled no doubt idly while she sat with you here, proves it!" Gruin walked to his writing-desk. He wasn't quite aware of how he got there. He knew only that in a minute he stood by the desk looking down at it--at a torn scrap of paper on the blotter--at one word, faintly scrawled on the paper. "Maria." And it was Maria José's handwriting. At the pallor on his grandson's face, the old man promptly forgot all charges of ribaldry. He caught Eldon Gruin and helped him to another chair, and then called the butler and a doctor.... Gruin was a strong-minded person. You have to be to plan and execute deliberate, cold-blooded murder. It wasn't long before a logical explanation occurred to him, and he drove to the shop of Maria's father. "You broke into our house," he accused. "You set a stage in my room--dropped perfume of the kind your daughter used on my chair, and wrote her name on a scrap of paper, imitating her handwriting, on my desk." He had come there confident in his conviction. But that conviction slowly faded as he looked into José's eyes. Dark eyes, smoldering, mystic, so like Maria's eyes. "You know it was not I who was there," José said in his pedantic, accented English. Just that. Nothing more. Gruin turned and almost ran from the basement shop. And as he hurried, beside him hurried unseen little heels that clicked and clicked with each swift step he took. They followed him out the door, a little behind him as he rushed, and to his car. And there they stopped. But he thought he saw the seat cushion beside him give a little with an unseen weight as he drove away.... * * * * * A strong-minded person in good health--that was Eldon Gruin. There was no insanity in the Gruin family. Yet in the days that followed he began more and more to fear, with a mighty fear, that he was going mad. For always he heard the little heel taps beside him as he walked, stopping when he stopped, beginning again when he went on. And always in his brain was José's curse, "_She will be with you always, beside you, walking when you walk, stopping when you stop. Always, always beside you._..."