In twenty minutes she was in the car again, speeding over the dark roads toward home, heavy of heart, depressed, weighed down with foreboding.... It was nearly eleven o’clock. She felt as if she could not reach Gibeon soon enough, and repeatedly begged her driver for more speed.... CHAPTER XX The east was glowing dully with approaching dawn when Carmel alighted from the car at the hotel in Gibeon and hurried through the deserted office and up the scantily illuminated stairs to her room. She was weary, not in body alone, but with that sharper, more gnawing weariness of the spirit. She had failed, and the heaviness of failure sat upon her.... She could not think. It was only with an effort she was able to force herself to undress and to crawl into her bed.... Then, because she was young and healthy, because she had not yet reached an age and experience at which troubles of the mind can stay the recuperative urge of the body, she slept. It was nine o’clock when she awakened, and with a feeling of guilt she dressed hurriedly, snatched a cup of coffee, and hastened to the office. She dreaded to meet Evan Pell, to confess her inadequacy.... There was another reason, deeper than this, instinctive, why she hesitated to meet him. It was a sort of embarrassment, an excited desire to see him fighting with reluctance. She did not analyze it.... But she was spared the ordeal. Evan Pell was not in his place. There was petty business to attend to, and an hour passed. Such hours may pass even when one is in the midst of such affairs as surround Carmel.... Her last night’s adventure seemed unreal, dreamlike. Gibeon, going about its concerns outside her window, seemed very real.... She looked out at Gibeon and her mind refused to admit the fact that it could continue normally to plod and buy and sell and gossip as she saw it doing, if there were anything beneath its surface. Crime, plotting, trickery, sinister threat--these could not exist while Gibeon looked and labored as it looked and labored this morning. The town should have lagged and whispered; apprehension should have slowed its steps and stilled its voice; a shadow of impending catastrophe should have darkened the streets.... But the streets were bright with sunlight. She saw women marketing with baskets on their arms; she saw farmers passing in automobiles and wagons; she heard children shouting and laughing.... It was Gibeon--a normal, unexcited, placid Gibeon. And yet, murder, or worse than murder, poised over the village on its black wings, poisoning the air its people breathed!... The whole thing was absurd. “Where is Mr. Pell?” she asked Simmy, who came in to lay a galley proof on her desk. “Hain’t been in this mornin’,” Simmy told her. “Say, George Bogardus’s been in twict to see you.”