"Doctor Bushnell, as I started to say," went on Bates, "is still here. Mr. Gilmore seems to be in quite a bad way, and the doctor is looking after him." "We'll go on upstairs," declared Griggs. "Tell the doc that we want him to come right on up and let us into that room." Wiggly Price did not follow them immediately; he loitered downstairs until Bates had delivered the message to the doctor and had returned. The butler, luckily for Wiggly, had not been told the reporter's true interest in the case, else he would have doubtless guarded his tongue most carefully. "It's a bad business, Bates," said the newspaper man to begin the conversation. "A terrible business," agreed the butler. "You don't think that Mr. Sarbella killed her?" "You do?" "What else could I believe, with all the queer happenings? But I hope not--as much for Mr. Gilmore's sake as anything, sir; he seems to take Mr. Sarbella's arrest almost as hard as the murder." "She was a bad lot, your master's slain wife, Bates." "I am not surprised at that," murmured the servant. "I sensed that she wasn't the right sort. I think we all realized that--except Mr. Kirklan." "Of course he wouldn't; she was a remarkably beautiful woman, and he was in love with her. Quite a sudden marriage, I understand." "Very sudden; a surprise and a shock to all of us." "It's much too bad, Bates, that Mr. Gilmore did not marry a woman of the right kind--Miss Joan, say." Wiggly's tone was disarmingly careless, and Bates did not understand that information was being sought. "Yes, it certainly is," agreed the butler earnestly, falling straightway into the little trap. "We were all hoping that it would turn out that way. All of us, except Mr. Kirklan, could see with half an eye that Miss Joan was in love with him, even if she is his stepsister; it cut her up terribly when she came home from Europe and found her here. Not only here, sir, but in Miss Joan's own room." "The room where the murder was committed?" "Exactly, sir; that was Miss Joan's old room--the one that she had occupied since she was quite a small girl. When she came back I didn't have the heart to tell her about the room. 'Bates,' she says to me, 'take the bags up to my room.' And I didn't have the heart to tell her--knowing how much store she put by it." This information, verification of what Etta Griggs had told him, might mean something or nothing, Wiggly knew; probably nothing. It was just that he had that avidity of the trained newspaper reporter for all the facts, because experience had taught him it is often the smallest detail which, in the light of other things, achieves prime importance. And there was the black hairpin; he was thinking of that again. That could not be overlooked. At this moment Doctor Bushnell appeared from the room on the first floor, where he had placed Kirklan Gilmore, and whose bedside he was just leaving.