The statement seemed to strike her and to arouse a new train of thought. She was silent for some time, and he sat watching anxiously, but without a sign of impatience. At last she looked up and answered: “You are mistaken; I’m absolutely in the dark. There’s nothing to point in any direction.” He accepted the disappointment, but accepted it as absolute. He evidently had striven by the assertion so positively made to surprise her into new thought, with the hope that it might hit on something that in his skilled hands would have meaning. He saw not only that he had not succeeded, but that there was no ground for success. “That, in itself,” he said, “is significant. It shows that we must dig deeper in his life than we have yet done. The motive; we want the motive!” “There was no motive,” she said. “It was motiveless. There are men who do murder for murder’s sake.” Under sting of her life experience, she spoke with keen bitterness. He leaned across the table, and for the instant she saw something in the man she had not seen before; something that flashed like a gleam of new intelligence and was gone with its very birth. “There are no motiveless crimes,” he said. “In this case, of all others, you may be sure a motive existed, and that when we put our hands on it, we shall find it a tremendous one--that is, tremendous in its imperative force.” “But what could be the motive--against a man like him?” “Because he was such a man, we may be the more certain of motive,” he said. “Under other conditions it might have been Judge Parlin.” He spoke at hazard--perhaps; but the effect was something startling. She grew pale as at the inquest before she answered as to the first knowledge of Wing’s death, and her companion expected for the moment that she would faint. But she was a woman equal to noteworthy sudden efforts, and even as he watched she overcame the momentary weakness. Yet it was with pale lips she stammered: “I understand. It might have been the judge.” Trafford waited, seemingly expecting something more, but when the pause grew awkward, he continued, “He told you he had a letter to write before he went to bed. Had he written it?” “I don’t know. It’s a thing we never shall know.” “It’s a thing that we will know, and that in a very short time. Who entered the room first that morning?” and there was a sense of action in his tone that caused her to look up with sudden interest. “I did. Mary told me expressly that she hadn’t dared open the door until I came, and Jonathan was by the body, outside.” “Was the door closed?” “Yes.” “Who closed it?” “I have never asked. I supposed it hadn’t been open.” “It was open,” he said. “He came to the door without a light when the bell rang. Naturally, he left the door open so that the light from the room would shine through. He would leave it wide open, to get the full light. Somebody shut that door!”