Robinson considered.

“I don’t want to be hard,” he said finally, “and I don’t want to miss any chance of cleaning up where poor Howells failed.”

He glanced at the extraordinary array of evidence.  The good nature which, one felt, should always have been in his face, shone at last.

“I don’t believe you’re guilty.  As far as you’re concerned it’s likely enough a put-up job.  I don’t know about the girl.  Go ahead, anyway, and tell us, if you can, how the locked room was entered.  Explain the mystery of that old man who looks as if he were dead, but who moves around and talks with us.”

“The answer, if it’s anywhere,” Bobby said, “is in the old room.”

Robinson nodded.

“Under the conditions it seems worth while.  Go on then and clear your cousin and yourself if you can.  You have until daylight to-morrow.”

Bobby’s gratitude was sufficiently eloquent in his eyes, but he said nothing.  He hurried from the room to find Katherine.  As soon as he had stepped in the corridor he saw her figure against the wall.

“Katherine!” he breathed.

“I’ve heard everything,” she said.

He led her to the main hall where the greedy ears in her bedroom couldn’t overhear them.

“Then you suspected what they were about?” he asked her.

“Uncle Silas,” she answered, “seemed just as he had been when I went upstairs, so I wondered, and I remembered I had left my door unlocked.”

“Then you knew those things were there?”

Her face was white.  She trembled.  Her words came jerkily: 

“Of course I didn’t.  I only kept my door locked because they had searched so thoroughly before.  It was an humiliation I couldn’t bear to face again.”

“You don’t know,” he asked, “who took that stuff from Howells; who hid it in your bureau?”

The trembling of her slender body became more pronounced.  She spoke through chattering teeth: 

“Bobby!  Why do you ask such things?  You believe I am guilty as you thought I was the woman in black.  You think now, because those things were in my bureau—­”

“Stop, Katherine!  You won’t answer me?”

“No,” she said, backing away from him.  “But you are going to answer me.  We have come to that point already.  Just an hour or two of trust, and then this!  It’s the Cedars forcing us apart as it did when we had our quarrel.  Only this time it is definite.  Do you think I’m guilty of these atrocious crimes, or don’t you?  Everything for us depends on your answer, and I’ll know whether you are telling me the truth.”

“Then,” he said, “why should I answer?”

And he took her in his arms and held her close.

She didn’t cry, but for a moment she ceased trembling, and her teeth no longer chattered.

“My dear,” he said, “even if you had hidden that evidence I’d have known it was to protect me.”

Then she cried a little, and for a moment, even in the unmerciful grasp of their trouble, they were nearly happy.  The footsteps of the others in the corridor recalled them.  Katherine leaned against the table, drying her eyes.  Graham, Robinson, and Rawlins walked into the hall.