"You shouldn't have drunk that medicine. It had stood too long. It would only have approximated its intended
effect."
"You mean," Bobby asked, "that I wasn't sleeping as soundly as I thought?"
"Probably not, but you're by no means a satisfactory victim. Men do unaccountable things in a
somnambulistic state, but asleep they haven't wings any more than they have awake. You've got to show us
how you entered this room without disturbing the locks. Now, Mr. Graham, we must comply with the law.
Call in the police."
"There's nothing else to do," Bobby agreed.
So they went along the dingy corridor and downstairs. From the depths of the easy chair in which Paredes
lounged smoke curled with a lazy indifference. The Panamanian didn't move.
While Graham and the doctor walked to the back of the hall to telephone, Katherine, an anxious figure, a
secretive one, beckoned Bobby to the library. He went with her, wondering what she could want.
It was quite dark in the library. As Bobby fumbled with the lamp and prepared to strike a match he was aware
of the girl's provocatively near presence. He resisted a warm impulse to reach out and touch her hand. He
desired to tell her all that was in his heart of the division that had increased between them the last few months.
Yet to follow that impulse would, he realized, place a portion of his burden on her shoulders; would also, in a
sense, be disloyal to Graham, for he no longer questioned that the two had reached a definite sentimental
understanding. So he sighed and struck the match. Even before the lamp was lighted Katherine was speaking
with a feverish haste:
"Before the police come--you've a chance, Bobby--the last chance. You must do before the police arrive
whatever is to be done."
He replaced the shade and glanced at her, astonished by her intensity, by the forceful gesture with which she
grasped his arm. For the first time since Silas Blackburn's murder all of her vitality had come back to her.
"What do you mean?"
She pointed to the door of the private staircase.
"Just what Howells told you before he went up there to his death."
Bobby understood. He reacted excitedly to her attitude of conspirator.
"He said," she went on, "that the criminal had nothing to lose. That it would be to his advantage to have him
out of the way, to destroy that evidence."
"I thought of it," Bobby answered, "just before I went to sleep."
"Don't you see?" she said. "If you had killed him you would have taken the cast and the handkerchief and
destroyed them? Hartley has told me everything, and I could see his coat for myself. The cast and the
handkerchief are still in Howells's pocket."
"Why should I have killed him if not to destroy those?" Bobby took her up with a quick hope.
"You didn't," she cried. "Nothing would ever make me believe that you killed him, but you will be charged