dozen people. You might
send them to the chair without uncovering the real mystery of the Cedars.
Maybe he might find something, and he'd be as safe in that room as in any
jail I know of. I mean one of us would be in the library and the other in
the corridor outside the broken door. How could he reasonably get out? If
there was an attempt to repeat the trick we'd be ready. As for the girl,
it's simple enough to safeguard against her getting away before morning.
As Mr. Graham says, no one's likely to run far in this storm, anyway."

Robinson considered.

"I don't want to be hard," he said finally, "and I don't want to miss any
chance of cleaning up where poor Howells failed."

He glanced at the extraordinary array of evidence. The good nature which,
one felt, should always have been in his face, shone at last.

"I don't believe you're guilty. As far as you're concerned it's likely
enough a put-up job. I don't know about the girl. Go ahead, anyway, and
tell us, if you can, how the locked room was entered. Explain the mystery
of that old man who looks as if he were dead, but who moves around and
talks with us."

"The answer, if it's anywhere," Bobby said, "is in the old room."

Robinson nodded.

"Under the conditions it seems worth while. Go on then and clear your
cousin and yourself if you can. You have until daylight to-morrow."

Bobby's gratitude was sufficiently eloquent in his eyes, but he said
nothing. He hurried from the room to find Katherine. As soon as he had
stepped in the corridor he saw her figure against the wall.

"Katherine!" he breathed.

"I've heard everything," she said.

He led her to the main hall where the greedy ears in her bedroom couldn't
overhear them.

"Then you suspected what they were about?" he asked her.

"Uncle Silas," she answered, "seemed just as he had been when I went
upstairs, so I wondered, and I remembered I had left my door unlocked."

"Then you knew those things were there?"

Her face was white. She trembled. Her words came jerkily:

"Of course I didn't. I only kept my door locked because they had
searched so thoroughly before. It was an humiliation I couldn't bear to
face again."

"You don't know," he asked, "who took that stuff from Howells; who hid it
in your bureau?"

The trembling of her slender body became more pronounced. She spoke
through chattering teeth:

"Bobby! Why do you ask such things? You believe I am guilty as you
thought I was the woman in