d that he needed no help.
Mentally benumbed by the horror of the tragedy, they stood there in the
quiet, summer night, barren of ideas. They were like children, waiting
to be instructed.

Hastings stood erect, pulling and hauling at his trousers.

"Can't find a knife or anything," he said. "Glad I can't. Hope he took
it with him."

"Why?" asked Sloane, through chattering teeth.

"May help us to find him--may be a clue in the end."

He was silent a moment, squinting under the rims of his spectacles,
looking down at the figure of the dead woman. He had already covered the
face with the hat she had worn, a black straw sailor; but neither he nor
the others found it easy to forget the peculiar and forbidding
expression the features wore, even in death. It was partly fear, partly
defiance--as if her last conscious thought had been a flitting look
into the future, an exulting recognition of the certain consequences of
the blow that had struck her down.

Put into words, it might have been: "You've murdered me, but you'll pay
for it--terribly!"

A servant handed Hastings the blanket he had ordered. He looked toward
the sky.

"I don't think it will rain any more," he said. "And it's best to leave
things as they are until the coroner arrives.--He'll be here soon?"

"Should get here in half an hour or so," Judge Wilton informed him.

The detective arranged the blanket so that it covered the prone form
completely, leaving the hat over the face as he had first placed it.
With the exception of the hat, he had disturbed no part of the apparel.
Even the folds of the raincoat, which fell away from the body and showed
the rain-soaked black skirt, he left as he had found them. The white
shirtwaist, also partly exposed now, was dry.

"Anybody move her hat before I came out?" he asked; "you, judge; or you,
Mr. Webster?"

They had not touched it, they said; it was on the grass, beside her
head, when they discovered the body, and they had left it there.

Again he was silent, brows drawn together as he stood over the murdered
woman. Finally, he raised his head swiftly and, taking each in turn,
searched sharply the countenances of the three men before him.

"Does--didn't anybody here know this woman?" he asked.

Berne Webster left his place at the opposite side of the body and came
close to Hastings.

"I know who she is," he said, his voice lower even than before, as if he
wished to keep that information from the servants.