wide wave of her white hair.

"You wanted to see me--about my daughter?"

Her voice was harsh, metallic, free of emotion. There was nothing about
her indicative of grief. She did not look as if she had been weeping. He
could learn nothing from her manner; it was extremely matter-of-fact,
and chilly. Only, in her eyes he saw suspicion--perhaps, he reflected,
suspicion was always in her eyes.

Her composure amazed him.

"Yes," he replied gently; "if I don't distress you----"

"What is it?"

She suddenly lowered her eyebrows, drew them together until they were a
straight line at the bottom of her forehead.

Her cold self-possession made it easy, in fact necessary, for him to
deal with facts directly. Apparently, she resented his intimated
condolence. He could fling any statement, however sensational, against
the wall of her indifference. She was, he decided, as free of feeling as
she was inscrutable. She would be surprised by emotion into nothing. It
was his brain against hers.

"I want to say first," he continued, "that my only concern, outside of
my natural and very real sympathy with such a loss as yours must be, is
to find the man who killed her."

She moved slowly to and fro on the armless, low-backed rocker, watching
him intently.

"Will you help me?"

"If I can."

"Thank you," he said, smiling encouragement from force of habit, not
because he expected to arouse any spirit of cooperation in her. "I may
ask you a few questions then?"

"Certainly."

Her thin nostrils dilated once, quickly, and somehow their motion
suggested the beginning of a ridiculing smile. He went seriously to
work.

"Have you any idea, Mrs. Brace, as to who killed your daughter--or could
have wanted to kill her?"

"Yes."

"Who?"

She got up, without the least change of expression, without a word, and,
as she crossed the room, paused at the little table against the farther
wall to arrange more symmetrically a pile of finger-worn periodicals.
She went through the communicating door into the bedroom, and, from
where he sat, he could see her go through another door--into the
bathroom, he guessed. In a moment, he heard a glass clink against a
faucet. She had gone for a drink of water, to moisten her throat, like
an orator preparing to deliver an address.

She came back, unhurried, imperturbable, and sat down again in the
armless rocker before she answered his question. So far as her manner
might indicate, there had been no