Surgical kit swinging at his side, the doctor bounded up the stairs, two steps at a time. Kirklan Gilmore was waiting just outside the door of Helen's room. The doctor offered his hand, and they clasped silently for a brief moment, the grasp of the physician warm-hearted, sympathetic. "Am I too late, Kirklan?" The novelist bowed his head. "Yes, Doctor Bushnell, you are too late. She is dead--I am sure she is dead. She shot herself with a pistol. She is--there." He pointed to the partly open door. "It--it won't be necessary for me to--to come in there with you?" The doctor gave a pitying glance at the young husband, whose wife had been taken from him after three weeks of marriage; he saw the haggard, drawn face, the horror-filled eyes, the twitching lips. "It will not be necessary," he answered quietly. "Perhaps you had better wait downstairs. If I need you I will call." "Th-thanks," gulped Gilmore. Doctor Bushnell, after a glance at Victor Sarbella, who, of course, was a stranger, passed on into the room and closed the door behind him. Being a doctor, he was steeled to death, but he was hardly prepared for the sight that shocked his eyes. Despite himself, his nerves reacted with a tingle of horror, and a gasp slipped through his lips. Quickly he bent over the still form of the beautiful woman; it was the first time that he had seen Kirklan's wife, although gossip of the surprisingly sudden unannounced marriage had reached the near-by village. Little more than a cursory examination was necessary to verify the butler's earlier findings. Helen Gilmore was dead; she had succumbed to that bullet wound which the doctor found in the chest, just a little below the left armpit. "She was murdered!" The butler's statement came back to Doctor Bushnell with a rush of conviction now. It would have been almost impossible for such a wound to have been self-inflicted. For the woman to have shot herself would have meant the holding of the weapon at a decidedly awkward and unnatural angle. Possible, perhaps, but highly improbable from a medical viewpoint. Doctor Bushnell's face had become grim. Swiftly he unfastened the surgical kit and found a long, slender probe, with which he might approximate the direction that the bullet had taken. Ranging downward! Still further argument against the wound having been self-inflicted. "Bates was right!" muttered the physician. "I wonder how he knew." He stepped back and glanced at the gun on the floor. He had, of course, noted that the moment he had entered the room, and he took it at the moment as proof of suicide. The pistol had every appearance of falling from the hand flung out over the edge of the lounge. "Who could have killed her--this beautiful bride of three weeks?" he said under his breath. As a physician, as a surgeon, he knew the right thing to do at the right time, but now a feeling of helplessness came over him. Obviously something had to be done. What?