The unreality grew when she sat at the midday dinner table, watching him carve a roast of beef into delicate slices.

“Well done or rare, Miss Adams?”

“Medium, please.”

Not Carlton, she thought, looking around the table. Not any of them. Not Susie, in a black dress with little or no make-up, and for once not smoking. Not Jan. Oh, certainly not Jan, looking young and tragic and not eating. Not even young Brooke, watching Jan and making such talk as there was. Certainly not Eileen, sick and hysterical in her room upstairs. Not William, his head still shaking as he passed the food. Not Ida, pale but efficient. Not any of them, she thought drearily. Then who?

The guards were taken out of the house that afternoon, but Mrs. Fairbanks’s room was left locked and sealed. There was still no news of Marian, and Jan, after a talk with her father on the telephone, had at last gone to bed and to sleep.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon when Carlton was taken to police headquarters for questioning.

Hilda was in the lower hall when it happened. He said nothing to anybody. When she saw him he was carefully selecting a stick from a stand, and he spoke to her quietly.

“If my wife asks for me,” he said, “tell her I have some things to do downtown. I may be late, so ask her not to wait up for me.”

She saw the car outside, with Captain Henderson and a detective waiting, and felt sorry for him, adjusting his hat in front of the mirror. When he turned she saw he was pale.

“I was fond of my mother, Miss Adams,” he said strangely, and without looking back went out to the officers and the waiting car.

At four o’clock that same afternoon Marian Garrison came home.

Chapter 17

She arrived apparently unwarned. Her first shock came when the taxi, violently honking its horn, tried to make its way through the crowd. The police officer drove it back, but when the driver stopped under the porte-cochere he found her collapsed in the seat and rang the doorbell.

“Lady here’s in poor shape,” he told William. “Want me to bring her in?”

William ran down the steps, to find her with her eyes shut and her face colorless.

“What is it? What’s wrong, William?”

“I’m sorry, madam. Mrs. Fairbanks is dead.”

“Dead? But the crowds! What’s wrong? What happened to her?”

“It was quite painless. Or so they say. She was asleep when it took place. If—”

She reached out and caught him by the arm.

“Not poison, William? Not poison!”

He hesitated, his old head shaking violently.

“No, madam. I’m afraid—It was a knife.”

She did not faint. She drew a long breath and got out of the car. The driver and William helped her into the house. But she could not walk far. She sat down on a chair inside the door snapping and unsnapping the fastening of her bag, her eyes on William.