Almost at the same instant Elsie heard her own voice screaming, “Don’t ... don’t...!” and saw the flash of a knife as Morrison raised his arm and struck again and again. Williams spun round as though to run, and his eyes, oddly surprised-looking, glared, straight and unseeing, at Elsie. Leslie Morrison stabbed at him again in the back. “What have you done?” sobbed Elsie to Morrison. “Oh, go!” She saw Morrison dash away up the passage, and at the same moment Horace Williams took a few steps forward. “Keep up--I’ll help you!” gasped Elsie. She thrust her arm beneath his elbow, dimly astonished and relieved to find that he was walking, when he suddenly lurched heavily against her, the upper part of his body sagging forward. Then he fell heavily and lay motionless, blood trickling from his mouth. Elsie, utterly distraught, and her knees shaking under her, felt her screams strangled in her throat. A distant figure showed at the near end of the alley, and she flew, rather than ran, towards the stranger, calling out in a high, sobbing voice for a doctor--for help. The woman, elderly and respectable-looking, asked what had happened. “I don’t know,” said Elsie. A blind horror was upon her, but instinct warned her to make no definite statement of any kind. A nightmare confusion followed. The alleyway, from being a silent and deserted spot, became clamorous with footsteps and voices. Elsie dimly heard a tall man in evening clothes saying that he was a doctor, and saw him kneel beside the blood-spattered form huddled upon the pavement. It was he, and a stalwart policeman, who finally lifted that which had been Horace Williams on to a hand-ambulance and took it away. Another man in police uniform took Elsie’s arm, giving her the support that alone enabled her to move, and helped her to a taxi. She almost fell into it, weeping hysterically, and he took his place beside her as a matter of course. In the sick, convulsed terror that shook her, his stolid presence was an actual relief. She thought that he was taking her home until he gently explained that she was coming with him to the police-station. “We want to get this cleared up, you know, and you can help us by telling us just what happened.” A new and more dreadful fear came over her. If Horace was dead someone would be accused of having killed him. They might suspect her.... Elsie felt as though she were going mad with the horror of it all. She began hysterically to scream and cry. VII It was still early in the day when Elsie’s mother came to her at the police-station. Her fat face was white, stained and mottled with tears. “It seems too bad to be true,” she kept on repeating again and again. “That’s what I said when I heard about poor Horace: too bad to be true. And you in this dreadful place, Elsie, and such a state as you’re in--and no wonder. The whole thing seems too bad to be true.” “Have they--found anything? Shall I be able to go home soon?” asked Elsie.