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 studio door at him, and after the box that held the wife he had loved was put in place, he went home in Madeleine’s car, leaving Prall to go with the undertaker in Barham’s own car.

“Don’t arrange for the funeral, of course, Prall,” he said, as a final order. “Just see that everything is done right, and when you can, go home and go to bed. I’ll look after myself.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Prall.

The police officers looked at each other.

“There’s a man for you!” Dickson said, and Hutchins heartily agreed.

“He’s a real man,” Jarvis put in. “He thanked me for what I had done, with tears in his eyes, and I haven’t done anything.”

“Yes, you did, Mr. Jarvis,” Babcock said; “I should have kept that woman here all night, if you hadn’t turned up. But it’s a relief to the poor man to get that part of it over with, I know. Now to get rid of the bunch in the next room and to get rid of them properly. They ought to be interrogated as well as just to get their home addresses.”

“They have been, mostly,” Jarvis said. “I slipped in there while you were talking with Mr. Barham, and the men were working fast. Mr. Barham was completely bowled over, wasn’t he? I can’t get his face out of my mind.”

“Yes, and he took it like a man,” Doctor Gannett said. “I have had to tell many a man that his wife was dead, and I never saw a braver attitude. And he loved her—you could tell that the way he looked at her. I could.”

Then the police, by rather slow degrees, dismissed the waiting guests, and the Clowns, the Knights, the Juliets