She did not rise as he let himself out, but sat beside her cold stove thinking and crying until her mother called her to come in and go to bed. CHAPTER XV Mrs. Balfame, after she dismissed the newspaper men, went up to her bedroom and sat very still for a long while. She was apprehensive rather than frightened, but she felt very sober. She had accepted the assurance of the chief of the local police that his inquiry regarding the pistol was a mere matter of routine, and had merely obeyed a normal instinct in concealing it. But she knew the intense interest of her community in the untimely and mysterious exit of one of its most notorious members, an interest raised to the superlative degree by the attentions of the metropolitan press; and she knew also that when a community is excited suspicions are rapidly translated into proofs, and every clue feeds the appetite for a victim. The European war was a dazzling example on the grand scale of the complete breakdown of intellect before the primitive passions of hatred, greed, envy, and the recurrent desire of man to kill, combined with that monstrous dilation of the ego which consoles him with a childish belief in his own impeccability. The newspapers of course pandered to the taste of their patrons for morbid vicarious excitement; she had glanced contemptuously at the headlines of her own "Case," and had accepted her temporary notoriety as a matter of course, schooled herself to patience; the ordeal was scarifying but of necessity brief. But these young men. They had insinuated--what had they not insinuated? Either they had extraordinary powers of divination, or they were a highly specialised branch of the detective force. They had asked questions and forced answers from her that made her start and shiver in the retrospect. Was it possible they believed she had murdered David Balfame, or were they merely seeking material for a few more columns before the case died a natural death? She had never been interviewed before, save once superficially as President of the Friday Club, but she knew one or two of the county editors, and Alys Crumley had sometimes amused her with stories of her experiences as a New York reporter.