She sprang up, throwing her hands wide and staring blindly at the stars.

The woman whom she was to bribe cast a deep shadow on her imagination.
Sharing the feeling of many others, she had reached the reluctant
conclusion that Mrs. Brace in some way knew more than anybody else about
the murder and its motives. It was, she told herself, a horrid feeling,
and without reason. But she could not shake it off. To her, Mrs. Brace
was a figure of sinister power, an agent of ugliness, waiting to do
evil--waiting for what?

By a great effort, she steadied her jangled nerves. Hastings was
counting on her. And work--even work in the dark--was preferable to this
idleness, this everlasting summing-up of frightful possibilities without
a ray of hope. She would do her best to make that woman take the money!

Tomorrow she would be of real service to Berne Webster--she would atone,
in some small measure, for the sorrow she had brought upon him,
discarding him because of empty gossip!--Would he continue to love
her?--Perhaps, if she had not discarded him, Mildred Brace would not
have been murdered.

A groan escaped her. She fled into the house, away from her thoughts.

XVI

THE BRIBE

It was nine o'clock the following evening when Lucille Sloane, sure that
she had entered the Walman unobserved, rang the bell of Mrs. Brace's
apartment. Her body felt remarkably light and facile, as if she moved in
a tenuous, half-real atmosphere. There were moments when she had the
sensation of floating. Her brain worked with extraordinary rapidity. She
was conscious of an unusually resourceful intelligence, and performed a
series of mental gymnastics, framing in advance the sentences she would
use in the interview confronting her.

The constant thought at the back of her brain was that she would
succeed; she would speak and act in such a way that Mrs. Brace would
take the money. She was buoyed by a fierce determination to be repaid
for all the suspense, all the agony of heart, that had weighed her down
throughout this long, leaden-footed day--the past twenty-four hours
unproductive of a single enlightening incident.

Mrs. Brace opened the door and, with a scarcely perceptible nod of the
head, motioned her into the living room. Neither of them spoke until
they had seated themselves on the chairs by the window. Even then, the
silence was prolonged, until Lucille realized that her tongue was dry
and uncomfortably large for her mouth. An ac