Robinson gazed at the fire.

“What’s to be done now, sir?” Rawlins asked.

“Find the answer if we can,” Robinson said.

Paredes spoke as softly as he had done the other night while reciting his sensitive reaction to the Cedars’s gloomy atmosphere.  Only now his voice wasn’t groping.

“Call me a dreamer if you want, Mr. District Attorney, but I have given you the only answer.  This man’s soul has dwelt in two places.”

Robinson grinned.

“I’m going slow on calling anybody names, but I haven’t forgotten that there’s been another crime in this house.  Howells was killed in that room, too.  I would like to believe he could return as Mr. Blackburn has.”

Blackburn looked up.

“What’s that?  Who’s Howells?”

And as Robinson told him of the second crime he sank back in his chair again, whimpering from time to time.  His fear was harder to watch.

“Might I suggest,” Graham said, “that Howells isn’t out of the case yet?  It would be worth looking into.”

“By all means,” Robinson agreed.

Rawlins coughed apologetically.

“I asked them about that at the office.  Howells was taken to his home in Boston to-day.  The funeral’s to be to-morrow.”

“Then,” Robinson said, “we’re confined for the present to this end of the case.  The facts I have tell me that two murders have been committed in this house.  It is still my first duty to convict the guilty man.”

Graham indicated the huddled, frightened figure in the chair.

“You are going against the evidence of your own eyes.”

“I shall do what I can,” Robinson said sternly.  “We buried one of those men this noon.  His grandson, his niece, and those who saw him frequently, swear it was this living being who has such a wound as the one that caused the death of that man.  There is only one thing to do—­see who we buried.”

“The permits?” Graham suggested.

“I shall telephone the judge,” Robinson answered, “and he can send them out, but I shan’t wait for hours doing nothing.  I am going to the grave at once.”

“A waste of time,” Paredes murmured.

“I don’t understand,” Silas Blackburn whined, “You say the doors were locked.  Then how could anybody have got in that room to be murdered?  How did I get out?”

Robinson turned on Paredes angrily.

“I’m not through with you yet.  Before I am I’ll get what I want from you.”

He stormed away to the telephone.  No one spoke.  The doctor’s rumpled head was still bent over the back of Silas Blackburn’s chair.  The infused eyes didn’t waver from the crimson stain and the healed wound, and Blackburn remained huddled among the cushions, his shoulders twitching.  Paredes commenced gathering up his cards.  Katherine watched him out of expressionless eyes.  Graham walked to her side.  Rawlins, as always phlegmatic, remained motionless, waiting for his superior.