For the fraction of a moment he rolled back his great, shaggy brows, and lifted his face up wide-eyed and staring to the soft, sweet, dove-colored, early evening sky. Then his eyelids came scrunching down again perfectly tight, and I saw one side of his ugly mouth begin to smile a little as a man might smile--as he closes the door--when the woman whom he loves comes home again. Then very slowly, very methodically, he turned off all the gas-burners and picked up all the notebooks, and cleansed all the knives, and just as I thought he was almost ready to go with me he started back again and released a fair, froth-green lunar moth from a stifling glass jar. Then, with his arm across my cringing shoulders, we fumbled our way down the long, creaky stairs. And all the time his heart was pounding like an oil-soused engine. But I had to bend my head to hear the questions that crumbled from his lips. As we crunched our way across the Lennarts' garden with all the horrible, rackety noise that the living inevitably make in the presence of the dead, we ran into Lennart's old gardener crouching there in the dusk, stuffing cold, white roses into a huge market basket. Almost brutally Sagner clutched the old fellow by the arm. "Dunstan," he demanded, "how--did--this--thing--happen?" The old gardener shook with fear and palsy. "There's some," he whispered, "as says the lady-dear was out of her mind. A-h, no," he protested, "a-h, no. She may ha' been out of her heart, but she weren't never out of her mind. There's some," he choked, "as calls it suicide, there's some," he gulped, "as calls it accident. I'm a rough-spoke man and I don' know the tongue o' ladies, but it weren't suicide, and it weren't accident. If it had be'n a man that had done it, you'd 'a' called it just a 'didn't-give-a-damn.'" As we neared the house Sagner spoke only once. "Barney," he asked quite cheerfully, "were you ever rude to a woman?" My hands went instinctively up to my head. "Oh, yes," I hurried, "once in the Arizona desert I struck an Indian squaw." "Does it hurt?" persisted Sagner. "You mean 'Did it hurt?'" I answered a bit impatiently. "Yes, I think it hurt her a little, but not nearly as much as she deserved." Sagner reached forward and yanked me back by the shoulder. "I mean," he growled, "do you remember it now in the middle of the night, and are you sorry you did it?" My heart cramped. "Yes," I acknowledged, "I remember it now in the middle of the night. But I am distinctly not sorry that I did it." "Oh," muttered Sagner.