When they fell back a little, he joined them on the porch, standing
always so that he could watch the body and see that no one changed its
attitude or even approached it. His eyes studied keenly all the furniture
in the room. Save for one overturned stiff-backed chair, it apparently
had not been disturbed.

The doctor arrived and, waiting for no information, approached the
murdered woman. As Bristow had done, he touched her wrist, and then
slipped his hand beneath her corsage so that it rested above her heart.
He straightened up almost immediately.

"Dead," he said to Bristow; "dead for hours."

The physician became conscious of the hysterical girl's moans, took a
step toward the bedrooms and paused.

"That's right, doctor," Bristow told him. "They need you back there."

The doctor hurried out.

"That is--that was Mrs. Withers, wasn't it?" Bristow, looking at the dead
body, asked of the group.

"Yes; and the other is her sister, Miss Fulton," one of them answered.

Bristow had seemed to all of them a peculiar man--too quiet and
reserved--ever since he had come to No. 9 four months before. They
remembered this now, when he seemed scarcely conscious of the identity of
the two girls who had lived almost next door to him during all that time.

Different members of the crowd gave him information: Miss Maria Fulton,
like nearly everybody else on Manniston Road, had tuberculosis, and Mrs.
Withers had been living with her. They had plenty of money--not rich,
perhaps, but able to have all the comforts and most of the luxuries of
life. They were here in the hope that Furmville's climate would restore
Miss Fulton's health.

Their coloured cook-and-maid had not come to work that morning, it
seemed, and Miss Fulton, who was the younger of the two sisters, was on
the "rest" cure, ordered by the doctor to stay in bed day and night.
Perhaps that was why she had not discovered Mrs. Withers' body earlier in
the day.

They gossiped on.

It was like a lesson in immortality--the dead body, with distorted face
and twisted limbs, just inside the room; and outside, in the low-toned
phrases of the awed women, swift and vivid pictures of what she; when
alive, had said and done and seemed.

"Everybody liked her. If somebody had come and told me a woman living on
Manniston Road had been killed, she would have been the last one I'd have
thought of as the victim." "All the other beautiful women I ever knew
were stupid; she wasn't."