Every one present looked around at the Studio. They saw a spacious room, about forty feet long by thirty wide, its lofty ceiling fully twenty feet high. An enormous fireplace was on the side toward the house, and above it ran an ornamental balcony, reached by a light staircase at either end. The fine, big windows were of stained glass, save where ground glass had been put in to meet the artist's needs. Originally a ballroom, the decorations were ornate but in restrained and harmonious taste. There were priceless rugs on the floor, priceless works of art all about, and furnishings of regal state and luxury. Yet, also, was there the litter and mess of working materials and mediums--seemingly inseparable from any studio, however watched and tended. Here would be a stunning Elizabethan chair, all carved wood and red velvet, heaped high with paintboxes and palettes; there, an antique chest of marvellous workmanship, from whose half-open lid peeped bits of rare drapery stuffs or quaintly-fashioned garments. Tables everywhere, of inlay or marquetry, were piled with sketches, boxes of pastels, or small casts. Jugs and vases, fit only for museum pieces, held sheafs of paint-brushes, while scores of canvases, both blank and painted, stood all round the wall. The armchair, in which Eric Stannard had sat when he died, was undisturbed, also the tables near it. A new idea seemed to strike Lamson. He said, "When you came in in the darkness, Mrs. Stannard, how did you avoid stumbling over the chairs and stands in your way? I count four of them, practically in the course you must have pursued." Joyce looked at the part of the room in question. True, there were four or more small pieces of furniture that would have bothered one coming in without a light. "That's so!" she said, as if the idea were illuminating. "I must have come in just after or at the very moment that Blake lighted the electrics!" "And found Miss Vernon already here?" "Yes," said Joyce. "Miss Vernon, will you tell your story?" said Lamson, abruptly, turning from Joyce to the girl. "Why--I----" Natalie fluttered like a frightened bird, and gazed piteously at the inquisitor. "I don't know how." "Good work!" commented Bobsy Roberts, mentally. "Smart little girl to know how the baby act fetches 'em!" But if Natalie Vernon's air of helplessness was assumed, it was sufficiently well done to convince all who saw it. "Poor little thing!" was in everybody's mind as the rosebud face looked pleadingly at the Coroner. At that moment, if she had declared herself the guilty wretch, nobody would have believed her. Lamson's abruptness vanished, and he said, gently, "Just a simple description, Miss Vernon, of your presence in this room last night." "It was this way," she began, and her face drew itself into delicious wrinkles, as she chose her words. "I had been, ever since dinner, almost, on the terrace." "Alone?"