The first chance came that night, was sitting in the parlor when I reached home—Iola! She had the hope of a new job—a good one—and wanted a recommendation letter from Miss Whitehall, and naturally, being Iola, couldn’t go unless I came along and held the sponge. It was so pat you’d think fate had fixed it, and it worked out as pat as it began. While Iola was in the parlor getting her letter I stayed in the kitchen—very meek and humble—and when the servant came back—Delia was her name—started in to help her with the dishes. We grew neighborly over the work, she washing and I wiping, and what was more natural than that we’d work around to the affairs of the ladies. They’d lost all their money and Delia was going to leave. How did that happen now? Sure, it’s the feller that killed himself done it—didn’t I know? I only had to let her talk, she was the flannel-mouth Irish kind. Here are the facts as they went in to Whitney & Whitney the next day. Miss Whitehall was generally very punctual, always getting home about half-past six. On the night of January fifteenth she didn’t get back till a quarter to eight. Such a delay was evidently not expected as Mrs. Whitehall became extremely nervous, couldn’t keep still or settle to anything. At a quarter to eight, hearing the key inserted in the door, Delia had gone into the hall, and seen Miss Whitehall enter. She was very pale and agitated. Delia had never seen her look so upset. She walked up the passage, met her mother and without a word they went into a bedroom and shut the door. At dinner she ate nothing and hardly spoke at all—looked and acted as if she was sick. The next morning when she read of the Harland suicide in the paper she nearly fainted, and after that was in bed for three days, prostrated by the shock, she told Delia. I guessed this would be my last piece of work on the Harland case and I wasn’t sorry. There was an awfulness coming over it that was too much for me. But it wasn’t, not by a long shot. I was in deeper than I knew, so deep—but that comes later. I’ll go on now to tell what happened that last night I was in the Black Eagle Building. It was coming on for closing time and I was making ready to go. I’d cleared up all my little belongings, and was standing by the switchboard pressing the tray cloth careful into my satchel, when I heard a step stop at the door and a cheerful voice sing out: "Just in the nick of time. Spreading her wings ready for flight." There in the doorway, filling it up with his big shape, was Tony Ford. For the first moment I got a sort of setback. Mightn’t anyone—thinking of home and husband and finding yourself face to face with a gunman? With one hand still in the satchel I stood eyeing him, not a word out of me, solemn as a tombstone. It didn’t phaze him a bit. Teetering from his heels to his toes, a grin on him like the slit in a post box, he stood there as calm as if he’d never come nearer murder than to spell it in the fourth grade.