"In Heaven's name, why don't you answer?" Miriam looked piteously from one man to the other. "Was Mr. Abbott chloroformed?" "No," replied Roberts. "He was stabbed in the back." Dragging aside the curtains, Miriam gazed in horror at the bed. The bedclothes had been pulled back and Paul Abbott lay upon his face. Under his left shoulder blade was a dark and sinister bloodstain. CHAPTER III COMPLICATIONS ALAN MASON stopped his restless pacing back and forth and looked at his watch--two o'clock. Surely, the autopsy must be over! He had waited for what appeared an interminable time for the County coroner, his assistant and Doctor Roberts to join him in the living room as they had promised. The afternoon papers would soon be off the press and distributed to the public; it would not be long before the reporters from the other local papers and even the representatives of the great news services located in the National Capital would be at Abbott's Lodge in search of the sensational. And they would find it! Alan's lips were compressed in a hard line. Only six months before he and his cousin, Paul Abbott, had been the closest of "buddies," then had come the estrangement and now death. Paul had been a social favorite, liked by one and all, and while he had absented himself from Washington during the past year, his tragic death would come as a great shock to his many friends. And Betty Carter--what of her? Alan raised his hands to his temples and brushed his unruly hair upward until it stood on end. The action did not bring any solution of his problems, and with a groan he resumed his restless walk about the living room. In remodeling the house, Paul Abbott, Senior, had thrown several small rooms into one, also taking down the partitions which inclosed the old-fashioned square staircase, and made the whole into a combination of hallway and living room. He had shown excellent taste in furnishing the old house, using in most instances the mahogany which had been in the family for generations, and when necessary to purchase other pieces of furniture he had hunted in highways and byways for genuine antiques. But Alan was in no frame of mind to appreciate rare pieces of Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and Chippendale. Tired of the monotony of his surroundings, he strolled into the dining room and walked moodily across it, intending to pour out a glass of water from a carafe on the sideboard. The room was square in shape, with two bow windows and a door leading into a sunparlor which, in summer, the elder Abbott had used as a breakfast room, as the large pantry gave access into it as well as into the regular dining room. From where he stood by the sideboard, Alan could overlook, through one of the bow windows, the garden entrance to the sunparlor. The snow had formed in high drifts, covering completely the rosebushes which, as he recollected, surrounded a plot of grass in the center of which stood an old sundial. It also was blanketed in snow.