Before I had time to question her further, the hall door opened and Babbitts came in with a trail of three reporters at his heels. I knew them all—Freddy Jaspar, of the _Sentinel_, who three years ago had tried to fix the Hesketh murder on me and had taken twelve months to get over the agony of meeting me, Jones, of the _Clarion_, and Bill Yerrington, star reporter of a paper which, when it couldn’t get its headlines big enough without crowding out the news, printed them in blood red. They had come from the inquest and clamored for food and drink, crowding round the table and keeping Molly, for all her preparations, swinging like a pendulum between the kitchen and the dining-room. I was keen to hear what had happened, and as she whisked in with Jaspar’s tea and Babbitts’ coffee, a beer for Yerrington and the whiskey for Jones, they began on it. There’d been a bunch of witnesses—the janitor, the elevator boy, Harland’s stenographer who’d had hysterics, and Jerome, his head clerk, who’d identified the body and had revealed an odd fact not noticed at the time. The front hall window of the eighteenth story—the window Harland was supposed to have jumped from—had been closed when Jerome ran into the hall. "Jerome’s positive he opened it," said Babbitts. "He said he remembered jerking it up and leaning out to look at the crowd on the street." "How do they account for that?" I asked. "Harland couldn’t have stood on the sill and shut it behind him." Jaspar explained: "No—It wasn’t that window. He went to the floor below, the seventeenth. The janitor, going up there an hour afterward, found the hall window on the seventeenth floor wide open." "That’s an odd thing," I said—"going down one story." "You can’t apply the ordinary rules of behavior to men in Harland’s state," said Jones. "They’re way off the normal. I remember one of my first details was the suicide of a woman, who killed herself by swallowing a key when she had a gun handy. They get wild and act wild." Yerrington, who was famous for injecting a sinister note into the most commonplace happenings, spoke up: "The window’s easily explained. What is queer is the length of time that elapsed between his leaving the office and his fall to the street. That Franks girl, when she wasn’t whooping like a siren in a fog, said it was 6.05 when he went out. At twenty-five to seven the body fell—half an hour later." He looked at me with a dark glance. "What did he do during that time?" "I’ll tell you in two words," said Jaspar. "Stop and think for a moment. What was that man’s mental state? He’s ruined—he’s played a big game and lost. But life’s been sweet to him—up till now it’s given him everything he asked for. There’s a struggle between the knowledge that death is the best way out and the desire to live." "To express it in language more suited to our simple intellects," said Jones, "he’s taken half an hour to make up his mind." "Precisely."