“So that was what you heard through the open door!” he said, making it a statement, not a query. “Well, Miss Merivale, he was coming up the steps toward you, and he said——” “He said, ‘When I pick you up to-night to carry you onto the stage—I shall kiss you!’” The shudder that came with this admission shook her. Her eyes turned toward the body which, for some reason, had not yet been taken away, and in their gaze there was fear and loathing, and—it might be—contempt. “Ah!” said Inspector Lowry, apparently unsurprised. “And what did you answer, Miss Merivale?” She hardly seemed to hear. Her eyes were still fixed upon that dead face, awful in its paint and powder, such a handsome face, lately so full of compelling charm, even now a face that one could scarcely pass without a second look. “What did you say, Miss Merivale?” She paused for only a moment; then, looking straight at the inspector, she replied very deliberately indeed: “I said: ‘If you do that—I shall kill you!’” CHAPTER XI IN THE STAR DRESSING ROOM A brief pause followed Sybil’s unexpectedly dramatic statement. Then Inspector Lowry bowed gravely. “That is all, Miss Merivale,” he said, without looking at her. “We shall not want you for a while, though I shall have to speak to you again later. I should advise you, as a friend, to go to your own dressing room to rest.” “May I—mayn’t I—go home?” she asked piteously. But on such points as these no amount of courtesy or human sympathy could make Lowry less inexorable. “Not just yet,” he said calmly. “Later, we shall see. Go and rest, my dear young lady. Do go and rest!” Norman Crane started forward to help her, but, to every one’s surprise, Claire McAllister, the extra woman who had been kept for possibly relevant testimony, was before him. “You come with me, you poor kid!” she exclaimed, as tenderly as she possibly could. “I’ll see to you. Gee, but this is a bunch of boobs, not to see that you’re about as apt to get in wrong as a two-months’ one! Come on, deary!” They vanished within the dressing room wherein Sybil had dressed for a possible triumph that selfsame evening—hard as it was for any of them to believe it. That evening? It might just as well have been a month earlier, and even Dukane, the imperturbable, was haggard with the strain already. To him Lowry said something in a low voice, and the manager turned at once to Mortimer’s valet, still standing at the door: “Wrenn, clear the couch in there. We are——” He paused, respecting the man’s feelings, and ended gently: “We are bringing him in.” They carried the big, splendidly made form into the room which he had left such a short time before, in such a high tide of life and strength. There was nothing of tragedy in this setting. Barrison looked about him curiously, as though he were in a queer sort of dream in which all manner of incongruities might be expected.