"But who? Who?" the girls were demanding, more excited over this picturesque solution than they had been since "the story broke." Even Miss Austin, who disdained to write "sob stuff" and was a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, was almost on her feet, while Miss Lauretta Lea, who wept vicariously for fifty thousand women three times a week, shrieked without shame. "Oh, fine!" "How truly enchanting!" "Dear Miss Crumley--Alys--who, who is the man?" "Oh, as to that, I've not an idea. Mrs. Balfame always has rather disdained men, and even if she were susceptible is far too straight-laced to permit any man to pay her compromising attentions, or to meet him secretly. But of course she is very pretty, still young to look at, so there is the possibility--" "But just run over all the marriageable men in the community--" "Oh, he might be married, you know." Alys struggled to keep the alarm out of her voice. "But in that case there would still be the wife to dispose of, and now, at least, he'd never dare kill her, or even divorce her. No, I don't hold to that theory. It's more like the reckless act of the unchastened bachelor still young enough for illusions. You must have a theory, Alys. Stand and deliver." Miss Austin spoke with quick insistence. She had detected her hostess' suppressed excitement and was convinced that the hint had not been thrown out at random. She also had been conscious of an indefinable change in her old associate, and now she noticed it in detail. She might be too self-respecting to dip her pen in bathos, but she was nevertheless young, and her imagination began playing about possibilities like lightning over a wire fence. The heat which confused Alys Crumley's brain was expressed by a dull glow in her strange olive-colored eyes, but she made a desperate effort to look impersonal and rather bored. "No, I have no theory: certainly it could not be any of the men hereabouts. Mrs. Balfame has known all of them from infancy up. Perhaps she met some one in New York; I don't know that she ever went to any of the tea-tango places--she doesn't dance; but she might have gone with Mrs. Gifning or Mrs. Frew, and just met some one that fell in love with her--Oh, you mustn't take a mere idea of mine too seriously." "Hm!" said Miss Austin. "It doesn't sound plausible. A man she met now and then at a tea-room! She's not the sort to drive men to distraction in the casual meeting--not the type. And I can't see the men that frequent afternoon tea-rooms working themselves up to the point of murder. No, if there is a man in the case, he is here; if not in Elsinore, then in the county; and it is some man who has known her long enough and seen her often enough to descend from mere admiration for her rather chilling type of beauty into the most desperate desire for possession--"