"Miss Morganthau will take the head of the class," then he said, low, as if to someone beside him: "She’s our prize pupil but we don’t say it before her face for fear of making her proud," then back to me as solemn as a priest in the pulpit, "That is the situation reduced to its lowest terms—he had no car." "Well that ends _him_," I said. "So it seems to me. In fact Cokesbury gets the gate. I won’t hide from you now that I went to Azalea because I’d heard a rumor of that talk on the phone and thought I’d do a little private sleuthing on my own. Didn’t know but what I was destined to be the Baby Grand Burns." "And nothing’s come of it." "Nothing, except that it drops Cokesbury out with a thud that’s dull and sickening for me, but you can bet your best hat it’s just the opposite for him." "Well, I guess yes," I said and walked along wondering to myself whose voice that _could_ have been. VIII After the inquest there was no more question about who was suspected. It was as if every finger in Longwood was raised and pointed to Mapleshade. The cautious people didn’t say it plain—especially the shop-keepers who were afraid of losing custom—but those who had nothing to gain by keeping still came out with it flatfooted. It wasn’t only that nobody liked the Doctor, or believed his story, it was because the people were wild at what had been done. They wanted to find the murderer and put him behind bars and seeing that things pointed more clearly to Dr. Fowler than to anybody else they pitched on him. All the gossip about the quarreling came out blacker than ever. The papers were full of it and the other worse stories, about Sylvia’s allowance and the will of her father. There wasn’t a bit of dirty linen in the Fowler household that wasn’t washed and hung out on the line for the public to gape at, and some of it was dirtier when they’d got through washing than it had been before. There were those who didn’t scruple to say that the whole tragedy was a frame-up between Virginie Dupont and the Doctor. If you talked sensible to them and asked them how Virginie could have got word to him that Sylvia was running away, they’d just push that to one side, saying it could be explained some way, everything wasn’t known yet—but one thing you _could_ be sure of—the one person who knew the whereabouts of that French woman was Dr. Daniel Fowler. I believe there were some days after the inquest when, if there’d been an anarchist or agitator to stand on the postoffice steps and yell that Dr. Fowler ought to be jailed, a crowd would have gathered, gone down to Mapleshade, and demanded him. Fortunately there was no one of that kind around, and he stayed quiet in his home, not even coming to the village. Two days after the inquest I saw Anne and she said he and Mrs. Fowler hadn’t been out of the house—that they were in a state of siege what with reporters and the police and morbid cranks who hung round the grounds looking up at the windows.