He did not relish the idea of being left alone in a perfectly strange apartment with two corpses and one gagged, bound and unconscious best friend--but he liked the picture of himself trying to make explanations to either his hostess or Mr. Piper when, in either case, the other party to the argument would be in possession of a loaded revolver, still less. He hoped that if Mrs. Severance were the survivor she had had a sufficiently Western upbringing at least to know how to shoot. He had no particular wish to die--but anything was better than being mangled--and a reminiscence of Hedda Gabler's poet's technique with firearms caused his stomach to contract quite painfully as he tightened the knots around Ted's ankles. Ted was the devil and all to get out on the fire-escape--and then you had to tie him so that he wouldn't roll off. He crawled back through the window, dusted his trousers, and settled his necktie as carefully as if he were going to be married. Married. And he had hoped, he thought rather pitiably, that even though Nancy had so firmly decided to blight him forever she might have a few pleasant memories of their engagement at least. Instead--well, he could see the headlines now. “Big Financier, Youth and Mystery Woman Die in Triple Slaying.” “_Dead_--Oliver Crowe, Yale 1917, of Melgrove, L. I.” It hadn't been his job, damn it, it hadn't been his job at all. It was now, though, with Ted perfectly helpless on the fire-escape where any crazy person could take pot-shots at him as if he were a plaster pipe in a shooting gallery. The idea of escape had somehow never seriously occurred to him--what had happened in the evening already had impressed him so with a sense of inane fatality that he could not even conceive of the possibility of any-thing's coming right. In any event, Ted, tied up the way he was, was too heavy and clumsy to carry down even the most ordinary flight of stairs--and if he were going to be shot, he somehow preferred to gasp his last breaths out on a comfortably carpeted floor rather than clinging like a disreputable spider to the iron web of a fire-escape. Oliver sighed--Nancy's firmness had admittedly quite ruined all the better things in life--but even the merest sort of mere existence had got to be, at times, a rather pleasant convention--how pleasant, he felt, he had never quite realized somehow until just now. Then, with a vague idea of getting whatever was to happen over with as quickly and decently as possible, he settled his tie once more and trotted meekly through the dining-room and beyond the curtains. XL “Why, Mr. Piper!” was Oliver's first and wholly inane remark.