"Mrs. Thornhill," I said, "you did leave the house. You went to Mr. Gilbert's study. The shot that killed him left you a nervous wreck, so that you can't hear a tire blow-out without reënacting in your mind the scene of that murder. You'll talk now." "You think I will? Talk to you?" very low and quiet, eyes once more closed. "Why not? It's got to come; here in your own home, with me--or I'll have to put you where you'll be forced to answer questions." "Oh, you threaten me, do you?" Her eyes flashed open, and looked at me, hard as flint. "Very well. I'll answer no questions as to what happened on the evening of Thomas Gilbert's death, except in the presence of Worth Gilbert, his son." My retirement down the Thornhill stairs, made with such dignity as I could muster, was in fact, a panic flight. Halfway, Cora Thornhill all but finished me by looking out from the living room, and calling in Ina Vandeman's voice, "Erne, show Mr. Boyne out, won't you?" Ernestine completed the job when she answered--in Ina Vandeman's voice, also-- "Yes, dear; I will." It was only the scraps of me that she swept out through the front door. I stood on the porch and mopped my brow. Across, there at the Gilbert place was Worth himself, charging around the grounds with Vandeman and a lot of other decorators, pruning shears in hand, going for a thicket of bamboos that shut off the vegetable garden. At one side Barbara stood alone, looking, it seemed to me, rather depressed. I made for her. She met me with, "I know what you've been doing. Skeet came to me about it while Ina was phoning home from the country club." "Well--she should worry! I've just finished with her list. Got an unbreakable alibi." "She would have," Barbara said listlessly. "She wasn't at the study that evening." "Huh! I worked on your tip that she was." Barbara had pulled off the little stitched hat she wore; yet the deep flush on her cheeks was neither from sun nor an afternoon's hard work. It, and the quick straightening of her figure, the lift of her chin, had to do with me and my activities. "Mr. Boyne," the black eyes came around to me with a flash, "do you suspect me of trying to pay off a spite on Ina Vandeman?" "Good Lord--no!" I exploded. "And anyhow, I've just found that what you imitated and Chung recognized, might as well have been the mother's voice as the daughter's." "Yes," she assented. "Any one of the family--under stress of emotion." Then suddenly, "And why do I tell you that? You'll not get from it what I do. I ought never to have mixed up my kind of mental work with other people's. I'd promised my own soul that I would never make another deduction. Then Worth came and asked me--that night at Tait's. I might say now that I never will any more...." She broke off, storm in her eyes and in her voice as she finished, "But I suppose if he wanted me to again--I'd make a little fool of myself for his amusement just as I did this time and have done all these other times!"