Only the faintest gray survived in the sky above the trees. The shadows were thick about them. The whispering snow urged him to use this moment for his happiness. It wasn't the thought of Graham that held him back. Last night, under an equal temptation, he might have spoken. To-night a new element silenced him and bound his eager hands. His awakening at the head of the stairs raised an obstacle to self-revelation around which there seemed to exist no path. "I'm sorry. Let us go back," he said. She looked at him inquiringly. "What is it, Bobby? You are more afraid to-day than you have ever been before. Has something happened I know nothing of?" He shook his head. He couldn't increase her own trouble by telling her of that. The woods seemed to receive an ashy illumination from the passage of the snowflakes. Katherine walked a little faster. "Don't be discouraged, Bobby," she begged him. "Everything will come out straight. You must keep telling yourself that. You must fight until you believe it." The nearness of her dusk-clothed, slender figure filled him with a new courage, obscured to an extent his real situation. He burst out impulsively: "Don't worry. I'll fight. I'll make myself believe. If necessary I'll tell everything I know in order to find the guilty person." She placed her hand on his arm. Her voice fell to a whisper. "Don't fight that way. Uncle Silas is dead; Howells has been taken away. The police will find nothing. By and by they will leave. It will all be forgotten. Why should you keep it active and dangerous by trying to find who is guilty?" "Katherine!" he cried, surprised. "Why do you say that?" Her hand left his arm. She walked on without answering. Paredes came back to him--Paredes serenely calling attention to the fact that Katherine had alarmed the household and had led it to the discovery of the Cedars's successive mysteries. He shrank from asking her any more. They left the thicket. In the open space about the house the snow had spread a white mantle. From it the heavy walls rose black and forbidding. "I don't want to go in," Katherine said. Their feet lagged as they followed the driveway to the entrance of the court. The curtains of the room of death, they saw, had been raised. A dim, unhealthy light slipped from the small-paned windows across the court, staining the snow. Robinson and Rawlins were probably searching again. Suddenly Katherine stopped. She pointed. "What's that?" she asked sharply. Bobby followed the direction of her glance. He saw a black patch against the wall of the wing opposite the lighted windows. "It is a shadow," he said.