“Of course not.” She lit a cigarette and smoked it feverishly. “He was devoted to her. But he doesn’t know what’s happened. He ought to know. He ought to be able to protect himself. Look,” she said, putting down the cigarette, “would you be willing to tell him? To go there and tell him? It wouldn’t do any harm. He can’t run away. That’s all I want, for him to know.”

It was a long time before Hilda agreed, but the girl’s sick face and passionate anxiety finally decided her. Also she was curious. There was something behind all this, something more than a distracted husband trying in the middle of the night to locate a missing wife. Why had he not come in when he learned that Eileen was sick? Surely that would have been the normal thing to do.

She knew she had very little time. The police had the cast of the footprint under the oak. They would be working on it now. They would have examined the shoes of the men in the house, measured them, perhaps photographed them. And if Amos knew more than he had told—

She hurried to her room to dress. As she opened the door she had the feeling that something had moved rapidly across the floor. Whatever it was she could not find it, and she dressed rapidly and went down the stairs. Evidently the officer there had no orders to hold her, for he smiled and opened the door.

“Out for a walk?”

“I need some air,” she said blandly.

Under the porte-cochere, however, she stopped. The crowd was still on the pavement, held back by the guard, and a photographer was holding up his camera. She turned quickly toward the stable and the broken fence. Amos was not in sight, but the soapbox lay on its side under the oak tree, some fifty feet away. She hurried to the break in the fence, and straightened, to look into the lens of a camera. A grinning young man thanked her. She made a wild snatch at the camera, but he evaded it.

“Naughty, naughty,” he said. “Papa slap. Now, what’s your name, please?”

“I have no name,” she told him furiously.

“Must be a disadvantage at times. How do they get you? Say, ‘Here, you’?”

He took another flash of her indignant face before she could stop him, and she was moving rapidly toward the corner when she became aware that the crowd was coming toward her. It moved slowly but irresistibly, as though propelled by some unseen power from behind. A half-dozen small boys ran ahead of it.

“That’s the nurse!” one of them yelled. “She’s got her cap off, but I know her.”

“Hey, nurse! What’s happened in there?”

The reporters were in the lead now. In an instant she was surrounded by eager young faces. She could see her bus a block away, and she stood haughtily silent, like a small neat Pekinese among a throng of disorderly street dogs. “Have a heart, sister.” “Come on, how was the old lady killed?” “Has anyone been arrested?”