He was about to ask her to use his given name; and then he thought how little intimacy could be achieved in this American cult of first-name familiarity with all the universe. "Yes?" he said. "I would--I would have thanked you for a wonderful time, which helped me more than you know. And then I would have gone home. But--" He waited. "I don't know how to say it," she stumbled. "I knew you were Bruce's--Bruce's brother, the one he should have had. But only tonight could I _feel_ it." She searched for a phrase. Finally: "I don't believe I could hurt myself by being serious with you." "I hope not," he said, as grave as she. "I can't promise it." "Why did you go to the Michaelises last night?" "I'm not quite sure." "You want to discover who killed Bruce? Isn't that it?" "I am not a self-appointed detective. The police can do that job infinitely better than I. But I have been thinking." "What do you think?" she persisted. "I certainly wouldn't go accusing someone who--" "Can you realize what Bruce meant to me?" She asked it quietly, as a meaningful request for truth. "We were more than siblings. We were friends, all our lives, in a way they haven't made words for." "I do know," he said, and he would have told it to few other creatures that lived. "I had a younger sister myself." "Even after he left home--can you imagine the way he continued to watch over me? How often he stepped in and used a word or two to straighten out a lonesome, confused, unhappy girl whom nobody else liked; how he steered me toward the kind of people I can feel at home with; how he healed the breach with my parents, when I _had_ to get away and they didn't understand; how he got me out of a wretched business office and into the museum, where I can like what I'm doing and believe it has some value. You knew Bruce, did you know that side of him?" "No," said Kintyre. "He wouldn't have talked about it. Still, yes, I can imagine." "And he was lured somewhere, and tortured, and murdered," she said. The lacquered fingernails stood white where she caught the table edge. Kintyre didn't touch her himself, but he held out his hand. She gripped it for a while. Her face was lowered. When she let go and looked up again, he saw tears. "I'm sorry," she gulped. "I promised not to bawl, and then--" Kintyre let her have it out. It didn't take long, nor was it noisy. She said at last, in a wire-thin voice: "Why was it done? Who would do it, to him of all people in the world?" "I don't know," said Kintyre. "I just don't know." "But you can guess, can't you? You know everyone concerned. That writer he was having the fight with. That businessman who owns the thesis manuscript. Gene Michaelis. You could be wrong! Even his girl, God help me for saying it. Who?" "Why must you know?" he asked. "Why?" It took her aback. "To know! To understand--" "Do you want to be reassured the murderer won't strike at you next? I hardly think you need fear that."