However, when she and Miss Gurney stated that they had retired at about eleven and had not left their rooms until called up by Richard to hear the tragic news, no comment was made by Gibbs and Corson merely looked at them abstractedly with the air of a preoccupied owl. “Then,” resumed Corson, “now that we’ve placed your whereabouts and occupations, will you state, any or all of you, what opinion you hold as to the identity of the women who are responsible for the death of Sir Herbert Binney?” “Those chorus girls,” said Miss Letitia, promptly. “I always told him he’d get into a moil with them, and they’d fleece him. They are a smart lot, and Sir Herbert, though a shrewd business man, was putty in the hands of a clever or designing woman!” “But these girls are mere children—” “In years, perhaps,” Miss Prall broke in, “but not in iniquity. A gentleman of Sir Herbert’s mild and generous nature could be bamboozled by these wise and wicked little vampires until they’d stripped him of his last cent!” “You seem to know a lot about them, Madam.” “Because Sir Herbert has told me. He often described the cleverness with which they wheedled and coerced him into undue generosity, and though he laughed about it, it was with an undercurrent of chagrin and vexation. And so, the time came, I feel certain, when Sir Herbert, like the worm in the proverb, turned, and what he did or said, I don’t know, but I haven’t the slightest doubt that it led, in some way, to such hard feeling and such a deep and desperate quarrel, that the affair resulted in tragedy.” Gibbs looked at the speaker. The Grenadier, as some people called her, sat upright, and her fine head nodded with stern denunciation of the young women she accused. Her tight-set lips and glittering eyes showed hatred and scorn, yet her fingers nervously interlaced and her voice shook a little as if from over-strained nerves. Even more nervous was Miss Gurney. Unable to sit still, she moved restlessly from one chair to another,—even now and then left the room, hurrying back, as if afraid of missing something. “Do sit still, Eliza,” said Miss Prall, at last; “you’re enough to drive any one distracted with your running about like a hen with its head off!” “I feel like one! Here’s poor Sir Herbert dead, and nobody paying any attention to it,—except to find out who killed him! I think our duty is first to the dead, and after that——” “Keep still, Eliza,” ordered Bates, who was never very patient with his aunt’s irritating and irritable companion. “Sir Herbert’s body and his affairs will be duly taken care of. It’s necessary now to discover his murderer, of course, and the sooner investigation is made the more hope of finding the criminal.” “Or criminals,” put in Gibbs. “Since seeing that paper, I feel convinced that the dying man tried to write ‘get both,’ meaning to insure punishing to the women who killed him.” “Then you think women really did the deed?” asked Bates, a strange fear in his blue eyes.