As Rush closed his own door behind him, his troubled spirit shifted its load. Indubitably, if Dr. Anna had not met him he should have walked until exhausted, and then boarded a train somewhere down the line and arrived in Elsinore dishevelled, haggard, altogether an object of suspicion. None knew better than he that in a small community the lightning of suspicion plays incessantly, throwing the faces of innocent and guilty alike into distorted relief. And he had half expected to find a newspaper man awaiting him in the hall below. Before turning on his lights he felt his way to the windows and drew the curtains close. For all he knew there might be a detective or a reporter sitting on the opposite fence. His legal mind, deeply versed in criminal law, fully appreciated his danger and warned him to arm at every point. The district attorney, one of Balfame's men, clever, ambitious, but too ill-educated to hope to graduate from Brabant County, or even, political influence lacking, to climb into the first rank at home, hated the brilliant newcomer who had beaten him twice during his brief term of office. That Rush "hailed" originally from the county only added to the grievance. If Brabant wasn't good enough for him in the first place, why hadn't he stayed where he was wanted? But Rush dismissed him from his mind as he remembered uneasily that Alys Crumley had been sketching out there at the Club while he had been wrestling with David Balfame. He knew her ambition to get a position on a New York newspaper as a sketch artist; but the possibility that she might have guessed the secret of his interest in putting an end to the scene, or intended to sell her drawing to one of the reporters, would have given him little uneasiness had the artist not been a young woman upon whom he had ceased to call some two months since. He had met Alys Crumley about eighteen months after he had returned to Brabant County and some three months after he had moved from Dobton to Elsinore, and at once had been attracted by her bright ambitious mind, combined with a real personality and an appearance both smart and artistic.