"What are you doing here?" she asked, with a quaver of bewilderment. "I'll answer that when you answer a question of mine," I temporized, as I held the revolver up before her. "Where did you get this?" She did not speak for a second or two. "Why are you spying on me like this?" she suddenly demanded. She sank into a chair, pulling nervously at her pair of worn gloves. "You insist on knowing?" I asked. "I've a right to know." "Because you are not Harriet Walter," was the answer I sent bullet-like at her. She raised her eyes to mine. There was neither anger nor resentment on her face. All I could see was utter weariness, utter tragedy. "I know," she said. She spoke very quietly. Something in her voice sent a stab of pity through me. "I'm only trying to help you," I told her. "I only want to clear up this maddening muddle." "You can't," she said very simply. "It's too late." "It's not too late!" I blindly persisted. "What do you know about it?" was her listless and weary retort. "I know more about it than you imagine," was my answer. "I know where this revolver came from, just when and where you picked it up, and just how near you came to using it." She covered her face with her hands. Then she dropped them to her side, with a gesture of hopelessness. "Oh, they'll all know now!" she moaned. "I knew it would come, some day. And I haven't the strength to face it--I haven't the strength!" I felt, in some way, that the moment was a climactic one. "But how did it begin?" I asked more gently, as I gazed down at the fragile and girlish body huddled together in the chair. "It began two years ago," she went on in her tired and throaty monotone. "It began when I saw I was a failure, when I realized that all was useless, that I'd made a mistake." "What mistake?" I demanded, still in the dark. "The mistake I wasn't brave enough to face. I thought it was the life I was made for, that they'd never understood at home. Even _he_ couldn't understand, I thought. Then they let me come. I worked, oh, so hard! And when I left the school all I could get was a place in the chorus. I was ashamed to tell them. I pretended I had a part, a real part. He kept arguing that I ought to give it up. He kept asking me to come back. I wasn't brave enough to acknowledge defeat. I still thought my chance would come; I kept asking for more time." "And then?" I prompted. "Then I couldn't even stay at the work I had. It became impossible; I can't tell you why. Then I did anything, from extra work with moving pictures to reader in the City Library classes. But I still kept going to the agencies, to the Broadway offices, trying to get a part. And things dragged on and on. And then I did this, this awful thing." "What awful thing?" I asked, trying to bridge the ever-recurring breaks in her thought. But she ignored the interruption.