With me! Why not? She had my set. I went and turned in with Hawkins. He had a little den leading out of his bedroom, which he used as a carpenter’s shop, and his laundress as a kitchen! It was very good of me to do that for a comparative stranger! But she wasn’t. You see--hadn’t I mentioned it?--Barbara was an old flame of mine. It was a close running between me and Bob at one time. But I backed out. He had four hundred pounds a year and I hadn’t a penny--that could be called certain. Sometimes I make a haul and sometimes I starve. That would have killed Barbara. She had always been educated to the necessity of a certain income. She came and settled in my rooms, so as to be near Bob. At Norwood she might as well have been in Alaska--these suburbs are so beautifully isolated. And then, as she confessed to me, she hoped to pick up evidence. Of course she believed in her husband’s innocence. She went farther than that; she was convinced that the murder was committed by someone in the Inn--in the house--at 7. I gave her a list of all the tenants. I tried to show her how impossible it was. On the ground floor was Kinsman, who had been shut up with Sophia. The set opposite was empty. The sets on the first floor were rented as offices, and both principals and clerks had been gone for hours at the time Murphy was stabbed. On the second floor, Murphy had one set and I the other. On the third floor, one set was empty and the other--the fatal set, although she knew nothing about that--belonged to Stapley. Stapley was a quiet young fellow. He was engaged to his cousin, spent his Sundays with his widowed mother at Dulwich, and was reading hard for a Civil Service appointment. As I pointed out to Barbara, Murphy was murdered on Saturday night, and Stapley always left for Dulwich on Saturday afternoon. I saw him come back myself at the usual time on Monday morning. But she wouldn’t be convinced. She was certain that the murderer was in the Inn, in the very house. The Inn bore with her. Laundresses stared after her sympathetically as she went up and down the old stairs, and called her to each other, “Pore young thing.” The fellows, many of whom had met her as Miss Martin, didn’t know how to show their sympathy. They brought her flowers and new-laid eggs--anything. One brought a stray white kitten that he’d found in a doorway. Arnold offered a pure-bred bull pup, and was hurt when she refused it. Arnold was a great fancier. His book of devotion was a bulky volume, “Druid on Dogs.” The girls who spend a social evening or a Sunday at the Inn occasionally talked of her with honest tears. They are good, kind, hard-working souls, these gay little shop girls, as a rule. And I think they felt it all the more because they could not do anything for her; dare not even say how sorry they were. Between them and her was the unbreakable barrier which stands breast-high between the women who are--well, particular--and the women who are not.