"Nothing," she answered with a start. "I'm nervous, that's all. Wouldn't you be, if you'd been waiting two days outside an empty house with a dead man inside it?" Her tone was sharp and querulous. Max looked at her in bewilderment. "Empty house!" he repeated. "What were you doing in it, then?" And he glanced round him, assuring himself afresh by this second scrutiny of the fact that the brick floor and the bare walls of this scullery had been kept scrupulously clean. The girl's white face, pale with the curious opaque pallor of the Londoner born and bred, flushed a very little. She dropped her eyelids guiltily. "You wouldn't believe me if I told you," she said, at last, rather sulkily. "I was living here. Is that enough?" It was not. And her visitor's looks told her so. "I was living here with my grandmother," she went on hurriedly, as she saw Max glance at the outer door and take a step toward it. "We're very poor, and it's cheaper to live here in a house supposed to be empty than to pay rent." "But hardly fair to the landlord," suggested Max. "Oh, Granny doesn't think much of landlords, and, besides, this is part of the property which used to belong to her old master, Mr. Horne--" "Ah!" ejaculated Max, with new interest. The girl looked at him inquiringly. "What do you know about him?" she asked, with eagerness. "I have heard of him," said Max. But the astute young Londoner was not to be put off so easily. "You know something of the whole family, perhaps? Did you know the old gentleman himself?" "No." "Do you know--his son?" "Yes." "Oh!" She assumed the attitude of an inquisitor immediately. "Perhaps it was he who sent you here to-day?" "No." She looked long and scrutinizingly in his face, suspicious in her turn. "Then what made you come?" Max paused a moment, and then evaded her question very neatly. "What made me come in here? Why, I came by the invitation of a young lady, who told me she was afraid to go in alone." The girl drew back a little. "Yes, so I did. And I am very much obliged to you. I--I wanted to ask you to go into that room, the front room, and to fetch some things of mine--things I have left there. I daren't go in by myself." Max hesitated. Beside his old suspicions, a new one had just started into his mind. "Did you," he asked, suddenly, "know of some letters which were written to Mr. Dudley Horne?" A change came over the girl's face; the expression of deadly terror which he had first seen upon it seemed to be returning gradually. The blue eyes seemed to grow wider, the lines in her cheek and mouth to become deeper. After a short pause, during which he noticed that her breath was coming in labored gasps, she whispered: "Well, what if I do? Mind, I don't say that I do. But what if I do?"