Page:Wadsworth Camp--the gray mask.djvu/264

254 probably tried to tell me that; tried to warn me, perhaps, that the murderer would return again to the body. I didn't tell Reed the truth. I am going to that room about which nearly everything centers. Before the night is over it may tell me what McDonald tried to say. There at any rate my mind should be more receptive to that flash of intuition I need to make some theory fit this mystery. Since the house is clearly dangerous, Nora, I want you to go home."

Her laugh was uncomfortable, but Garth recognized its determined quality.

"I'll see it through, thanks," she said. "I want this sense of suffering destroyed. I want—you don't know how anxious I am—to see the case put on a physical basis. So I'll watch with you."

Since he failed to alter her determination, he sent her upstairs to make sure no one was spying, for he wanted their entrance of the room of death to remain a secret. She beckoned him from the head of the stairs, and he went up, and they entered the black room.

Garth closed the door and snapped his light on. Immediately strange reflections played again over the face of the dead man. Its sneering expression seemed to follow Garth as he moved about, searching in the closets and the bath room, looking behind each piece of furniture. Meantime Nora waited, for the moment stripped of her familiar confidence. She watched the dead man rather than Garth. The