"Cold--already! If I hadn't touched--"
The horror of the thing descended upon her, stifling thought. Automatically she left the room and told Jenkins
what to do. After he had telephoned police headquarters in the county seat and had summoned Doctor Groom,
a country physician, she sat without words, huddled over the library fire.
The detective, a competent man named Howells, and Doctor Groom arrived at about the same time. The
detective made Katherine accompany them upstairs while he questioned her. In the absence of the coroner he
wouldn't let the doctor touch the body.
"I must repair this lock," he said, "the first thing, so nothing can be disturbed."
Doctor Groom, a grim and dark man, had grown silent on entering the room. For a long time he stared at the
body in the candle light, making as much of an examination as he could, evidently, without physical contact.
"Why did he ever come here to sleep?" he asked in his rumbling bass voice. "Nasty room! Unhealthy room!
Ten to one you're a formality, policeman. Coroner's a formality."
He sneered a little.
"I daresay he died what the hard-headed world will call a natural death. Wonder what the coroner'll say."
The detective didn't answer. He shot rapid, uneasy glances about the room in which a single candle burned.
After a time he said with an accent of complete conviction:
"That man was murdered."
Perhaps the doctor's significant words, added to her earlier dread of the abnormal, made Katherine read in the
detective's manner an apprehension of conditions unfamiliar to the brutal routine of his profession. Her
glances were restless, too. She had a feeling that from the shadowed corners of the faded, musty room
invisible faces mocked the man's stubbornness.
All this she recited to Bobby when, under extraordinary circumstances neither of them could have foreseen, he
arrived at the Cedars many hours later.
Of the earlier portion of the night of his grandfather's death Bobby retained a minute recollection. The
remainder was like a dim, appalling nightmare whose impulse remains hidden.
When he went to his apartment to dress for dinner he found the letter of which Silas Blackburn had spoken to
Katherine. It mentioned the change in the will as an approaching fact nothing could alter. Bobby fancied that
the old man merely craved the satisfaction of terrorizing him, of casting him out with all the ugly words at his
command. Still a good deal more than a million isn't to be relinquished lightly as long as a chance remains.
Bobby had an engagement for dinner. He would think the situation over until after dinner, then he might go.
It was, perhaps, unfortunate that at his club he met friends who drew him in a corner and offered him too
many cocktails. As he drank his anger grew, and it wasn't all against his grandfather. He asked himself why
during the last few months he had avoided the Cedars, why he had drifted into too vivid a life in New York. It
increased his anger that he hesitated to give himself a frank answer. But always at such moments it was
Katherine rather than his grandfather who entered his mind. He had cared too much for her, and lately, beyond
question, the bond of their affection had weakened.
He raised his glass and drank. He set the glass down quickly as if he would have liked to hide it. A big man,