"Go ahead. I said not to tell anybody till you told me first. Well, you’re going to tell me first now." Standing by the table, her eyes bright on the old man, she said slowly and clearly: "Troop says he never took Miss Whitehall down from her offices on the night of January the fifteenth." George gave a smothered ejaculation and started forward. I was transfixed—not believing my ears. Only the chief looked unmoved, leaning against the mantelpiece, holding Molly’s glance with his. "Go on," he growled. "He says that he was there later than usual, until eight, because of the accident and the other car being broken. Before that he took down the two Azalea Woods Estates clerks, Iola Barry and Tony Ford, but not Miss Whitehall. After the accident he ran out into the street, and when he came back the people were on every landing ringing the bells and wild because the elevator didn’t come. He went up and took them off, but Miss Whitehall wasn’t among them. He said that he’d heard some of them got tired of waiting and went by the stairs." "He thought Miss Whitehall went that way?" "Yes, it was the only way she could have gone. He supposed she’d got impatient or hysterical and just rushed pell-mell down." "Did Troop or anyone else see her in the lower hall or leaving the building?" "No, I questioned him careful about that. He thought she’d seen the excitement on Broadway and run down and maybe met someone who’d told her what had happened. And not wanting to get in it she’d gone out the side door. Anyway he said she wasn’t in the ground floor hall, or out in the street with the others or he’d have seen her." There was a pause. In that pause—like figures in a picture—I saw George, amazed, petrified, staring at his father, Molly looking from one to the other, and the chief with his brows low down and his head drooped, gazing at the fire. In a moment they would burst into speech—the speech that was withheld while that astounding revelation found acceptance in their minds. To hear what they said—to listen to what I couldn’t believe and yet couldn’t contradict—was more than I could stand just then. Without a word, unnoticed by any of them, I slipped out, fled down the hall, into the elevator and out to the street. It was cold, a sharp, frosty night, with a few stars shining in the deep-blue sky. Dark masses of men flowed out of the doors of skyscrapers and drained away down the subway entrances. I jostled through them, elbowing them right and left, instinctively turning my face uptown, deaf to the curses that followed me, blind to the lights that stretched in a spangled vista in front.