Robinson nodded.

“She’ll never forgive you,” Bobby said.  “It’s spying.”

He wondered that Graham should choose such a course so soon after it had become clear that Katherine had never really loved him.

“It’s the best way to satisfy them,” Graham said.  “I have, perhaps, more faith than you in Katherine.”

He left them to carry out Robinson’s instructions.  They waited at the entrance of the private staircase.

“I may witness this outrage?” Bobby asked.

“I’d rather you didn’t speak of it in such harsh terms,” Robinson smiled.

Bobby didn’t know what to expect.  The whole thing might be a trick of Paredes, in line with his hints the night of Howells’s death, to involve Katharine.  The quiet confidence of the two officials was disturbing.  What had Rawlins seen?

After a long time Graham descended the private staircase, carrying a lighted candle.  He beckoned and they followed him back through the private hall into the wide and mournful bedroom.  It encouraged Bobby to see the district attorney and the detective hurry across it.  After all, they were really without confidence of solving its ghostly riddle.  What they were about to do, he argued, was a last chance.  They would find nothing.  They would acknowledge themselves beaten.

When they entered the farther wing he noticed that Katherine’s door stood wide.

“You see,” he said.

“When I called her,” Graham explained, “she thought something had happened to her grandfather.  She ran out.”

“And forgot all about the door,” Robinson grinned.  “That’s lucky.  Now, Rawlins.”

Bobby couldn’t bring himself to cross the threshold, but from the corridor he could see the interior of the room and all that went on there during the next few moments.  A candle burned on the bureau, exposing the feminine neatness and delicacy of the furnishings.  The presence of the three men was a desecration; what they were about to do, an unforgivable act of vandalism.

Rawlins went to a work table while Robinson rummaged in the closet.  Graham, meantime, bent against the footboard of the bed, watching with anxious eyes.  Bobby’s anger was increased by this picture.  He resisted an impulse to run to the stairs and call Katherine up.  That would simply increase Robinson’s suspicions.  There was nothing she could do, nothing he could do.

Rawlins had clearly been unsuccessful at the work table.  He glided to the bureau.  One after the other he opened the drawers, fumbling within, lifting the contents out, replacing them with a rough haste while Bobby’s futile rage increased.

Suddenly he saw Graham’s attitude alter.  Rawlins’s back stiffened.  He pulled the bottom drawer altogether from the bureau and thrust it to one side.  He gazed in the opening.

“Come here, Mr. Robinson,” he said softly.

Robinson left the closet and stooped beside the detective.  He exclaimed.  Graham went closer looking over their backs.