s locked. This lets in from the corridor. Key to her bedroom
door's in the lock."

Garth entered the hall. Randall's hat lay as the inspector had described
it. Its gilt initials stared up at Garth with an odd air of appeal. He
saw Treving's coat and hat--another tragic excitation for the doctor if
he had chanced to notice them--on a chair by the table. A key, which
Garth found fitted the front door, lay at the table's edge. Garth
replaced it there and continued up the stairs.

Mrs. Randall's cries were quieter. Garth, inured as he was to unbridled
suffering, was grateful. He unlocked the door of the dressing-room and
paused just across the sill while he made a quick survey of the scene of
the murder. There was plenty of light and air here, for the curtains
were thrown back and the window was open. Since the doctor had
unquestionably left by the front door he could not understand why the
window had been opened on such a chilly night. He mused. Before
bothering with Randall's course from the verandah it would be useful to
examine the source of everything.

The table cover was awry. One or two books lay on the floor beneath.
Half a dozen long-stemmed roses, faded as they were, still splashed
color across the carpet of a neutral tint. As his eyes took them in
Garth smiled, shame-facedly reminiscent.

He started. The formless, agonized cry of a woman arose and seemed to
set in violent motion the atmosphere of this tragic chamber.

The cry was repeated. Garth shivered. He had a quick uncomfortable fancy
that the woman was making horrid and superhuman efforts to overcome some
obstacle to expression.

"I wish she'd keep quiet," he thought. "Confound it! There's no acting
about that. She wants to talk and can't."

He returned to his scrutiny of the room. Its disordered condition
suggested a struggle before Randall had fired the shots and dropped the
revolver there at the end of the table.

A circle of no great radius would have enclosed the scattered and faded
roses. No--not all. One bud lay farther off, nearer the bedroom door.

Garth tiptoed to it, stooped, and picked it up, examining it curiously
while he tried to reconstruct from it an active picture of the tragedy.
The stem had been broken away, indicating, since Treving or Randall had
probably worn it, the close and desperate nature of their struggle. For
it was not like the roses from the vase. They were of a larger variety
and wider open, and this lay, he estim