“I did,” she said in a whisper, and raised her eyes as if confronting a doubter with the truth. “I _know_ it--I _did_ see somebody.” Somebody! The word struck her ear with a startling effect, an effect of discovery, of impending disclosures. Her body shrank together as if in fear of them, her riveted glance grew fixed as a sleep-walker’s. She lost all sense of her surroundings, her entire being contracted to a point of inner activity. Before that intensified mental vision a series of pictures passed like the slides in a magic lantern:--Shine’s photograph, the worn, wide-eyed face of Sybil; Joe playing Sebastian, his costume, his movements, a replica of Viola’s; the living-room as they heard the shot, dusk falling outside; in the summer-house--with its shrouding vines--it would have been almost dark. The pictures were disconnected like spots of light breaking through darkness. If the darkness could be dispelled and the spots of light joined, fused into continuity, she would reach something, something she was groping toward, fearfully groping toward. Suddenly a recollection flashed up, clairvoyantly distinct--Joe at the flat trying to make Bassett give him the part of Sebastian, imitating Sybil’s walk. That picture brought her to her feet, brought a smothered cry to her lips. The spots of light had joined, run together in a leaping illumination. On the bureau lay the key of Joe’s trunk that she had brought from his room after their last interview. She snatched it up and ran to the door, out of it, along the gallery. In Joe’s room she turned on the light and unlocked his trunk. She went through it to the bottom looking for his Sebastian costume. It was gone, every appointment of it. She had not needed the proof, she knew that she would not find it, that it was Joe, dressed in that costume, Stokes had killed. The rest of it--Sybil alive, hiding somewhere! She saw the gray dawn on the window--the night was over, the house would soon be stirring. She locked the trunk, turned off the light and stole out on the gallery. She did not go back to her room but kept on down the hall to the top-floor staircase. Half-way up she heard from the floor above a sound, so faint, so furtive, that it would only have been audible in the dead dawn hush. She made a rush upward sending her voice, low-keyed but passionately urgent, ahead of her: “Sybil, Sybil, if it’s you, wait. It’s Anne. I’m coming to help you.” The door of the bedroom opposite the stair-head was open. Against the pale light of the window, poised with one hand resting on the raised sash, was a boy’s figure--surely the figure she had seen in the living-room two nights before. It was so completely boyish, the cropped round head, the knickerbockers and belted jacket, that she could not yet be sure and went forward with slackened gait, peering and murmuring fearfully: “Sybil, it _is_ you?”