"And so the police have given up the case!" she said despairingly. "And if they had not, Harry would have been arrested. Is there nothing I can do? Do I have to sit back with my hands folded?" "The police have not exactly given up the case," I told her, "but there is such a thing, of course, as stirring up a lot of dust and then running to cover like blazes before it settles. By the time the public has wiped it out of its eyes and sneezed it out of its nose and coughed it out of its larynx, the dust has settled in a heavy layer, clues are obliterated, and the public lifts its skirts and chooses another direction. The 'no thoroughfare' sign is up." She sat there for fifteen minutes, interrupted by occasional noisy excursions from the nursery, which resulted in her acquiring by degrees a lapful of broken wheels, three-legged horses and a live water beetle which the boys had found under the kitchen sink and imprisoned in a glass topped box, where, to its bewilderment, they were assiduously offering it dead and mangled flies. But our last five minutes were undisturbed, and the girl brought out with an effort the request she had tried to make all day. "Whoever killed my father--and it was murder, Mr. Knox--whoever did it is going free to save a scandal. All my--friends"--she smiled bitterly--"are afraid of the same thing. But I can not sit quiet and think nothing can be done. I _must_ know, and you are the only one who seems willing to try to find out." So it was, that, when I left the house a half hour later, I was committed. I had been commissioned by the girl I loved--for it had come to that--to clear her lover of her father's murder, and so give him back to her--not in so many words, but I was to follow up the crime, and the rest followed. And I was morally certain of two things--first, that her lover was not worthy of her, and second, and more to the point, that innocent or guilty, he was indirectly implicated in the crime. I had promised her also to see Miss Letitia that day if I could, and I turned over the events of the preceding night as I walked toward the station, but I made nothing of them. One thing occurred to me, however. Bella had told Margery that I had been up all night. Could Bella--? But I dismissed the thought as absurd--Bella, who had scuttled to bed in a panic of fright, would never have dared the lower floor alone, and Bella, given all the courage in the world, could never have moved with the swiftness and light certainty of my midnight prowler. It had not been Bella. But after all I did not go to Bellwood. I met Hunter on my way to the station, and he turned around and walked with me. "So you've lain down on the case!" I said, when we had gone a few steps without speaking. He grumbled something unintelligible and probably unrepeatable. "Of course," I persisted, "being a simple and uncomplicated case of suicide, there was nothing in it anyhow. If it had been a murder, under peculiar circumstances--"