I stood at the door and watched until I saw first Chung's head come into the light on the kitchen porch, then Jim Edwards's black poll follow it. I waited until both had gone into the house and the door was shut, before I went back to Barbara and Worth. They were speaking together in low tones over at the hearth. The three of us were alone; and the blood-stain on the rug, out of sight there in the shadow beyond the table, would seem to cry out as a fourth. "Barbara," I broke in across their talk, "who was the woman who came here to this place last night?" She didn't answer me. Instead, it was Worth who spoke. "Better come here and listen to what Bobs has been saying to me, Jerry, before you ask any questions." I crossed and stood between the two young people. "Well," I grunted; and though Barbara's face was white, her eyes big and black, she answered me bravely, "Mr. Gilbert did not kill himself. Worth doesn't think so, either." "What!" It was jolted out of me. After a moment's thought, I finished, "Then I've got to know who the woman was that visited this room last night." For a long while she made no reply, studying Worth's profile as he stared steadily into the fire. No signal passed between them, but finally she came to her decision and said, "Mr. Boyne, ask Worth what he thinks I ought to say to that." Instead, "Who was it, Worth?" I snapped, speaking to the back of the young man's head. The red came up into the girl's face, and her eyes flashed; but Worth merely shrugged averted shoulders. "You can search me," he said, and left it there. I looked from one to the other of these young people: Worth, whom I loved as I might have my own son had I been so fortunate as to possess one; this girl who had made a place of warmth for herself in my heart in less than a day, whose loyalty to my boy I was certain I might count on. How different this affair must look to them from the face it wore to me, an old police detective, who had bulled through many inquiries like this, the corpse itself, perhaps, lying in the back of the room, instead of the blood-stain we had there on the rug; what was practically the Third Degree being applied to relatives and friends; with the squalid prospect of a court trial ahead of us all. If they'd seen as much of this sort of thing as I had, they wouldn't be holding me up now, tying my hands that were so willing to help, by this fine-spun, overstrained notion of shielding a woman's name.