Corson meant to be very intimidating, but he found himself wax in their hands. One and all they denied knowing anything of Sir Herbert Binney after he had entertained them at supper and sent them home in a cab. They expressed mild surprise at his tragic fate, but no real regret. They seemed to Corson like four heartless, brainless dolls who had no thought, no interest outside their silly selves. But in the dark eyes of Viola Mersereau and in the blonde, rosy face of Babe Russell he saw unmistakable signs of fear,—and, working on this, he blustered and accused and threatened until he had them all in hysteria. “You’ve not got a chance!” he declared. “You’re caught red-handed! You two said in so many words that you wished the old chap was dead, and after you got home, you sneaked out,—whether there were others to know it, or not, I can’t say,—but you two sneaked out, went to The Campanile, waited your chance, dashed in and stabbed the man and dashed away again. And you’d been safe, but for his living long enough to tell on you! ‘Women did this!’ Of course they did! And _you’re_ the women! Who else could it be? What other women,—what other sort of women would commit such a deed? Come now, are you going to own up?” CHAPTER VII Enlightening Interviews The avalanche of denial, the flood of vituperation and the general hullabaloo that was set up by the four girls at Corson’s accusation reduced the detective to a pulp of bewilderment. The girls saw this and pursued their advantage. They stormed and raged, and then, becoming less frightened they guyed and jollied the poor man until he determined that he must have help of some sort. Moreover, he felt sure now that these youngsters never committed murder. Even the Mersereau girl, the vamp, as she had been called, was a young thing of nineteen, and her vampire effect was only put on when occasion demanded. “S’posen I did say I’d like to kill him!” she exclaimed, “that don’t mean anything! S’posen I said I died o’ laughin’, would you think I was dead? Those things are figgers of speech,—that’s what they are!” She paraded up and down the room with a tragedy-queen air, and rolled her practiced eyeballs at Corson. And Babe Russell was equally scornful, though her soft, gentle effects were the opposite of Viola’s ways. “Silly!” she said, shaking her pinkened finger at the detective. “To think us nice, pretty little girls would kill a big grown-up man! First off, we _couldn’t_ do it,—we wouldn’t have the noive! And we’d be too ’fraid of getting caught. And we, wouldn’t do it anyway,—it isn’t in the picture!” They seemed so straightforward and so sensible that Corson began to think it was absurd to suspect them, and yet the two he watched most closely were surely afraid of something. They talked gayly, and babbled on smilingly, but they glanced at each other with anxious looks when they thought the detective wasn’t looking.