Page:The Millbank Case - 1905 - Eldridge.djvu/47

 tone. It was as if he stated what was indisputable.

The statement seemed to strike her and to arouse a new train of thought. She was silent for some time, and he sat watching anxiously, but without a sign of impatience. At last she looked up and answered:

"You are mistaken; I'm absolutely in the dark. There's nothing to point in any direction."

He accepted the disappointment, but accepted it as absolute. He evidently had striven by the assertion so positively made to surprise her into new thought, with the hope that it might hit on something that in his skilled hands would have meaning. He saw not only that he had not succeeded, but that there was no ground for success.

"That, in itself," he said, "is significant. It shows that we must dig deeper in his life than we have yet done. The motive; we want the motive!"

"There was no motive," she said. "It was motiveless. There are men who do murder for murder's sake." Under sting of her life experience, she spoke with keen bitterness.