Paredes sighed.

“The Cedars’s final tragedy, yet it was the most graceful exit he could have made.”

Maria struggled to her feet.  Her eyes were the eyes of a person without reason.  That familiar, hysterical quality which they had heard before at a distance vibrated in her voice.

“Then he was the one!  I wanted to kill him, I couldn’t kill him because I never was sure.”

“Did you see him go out an hour or so ago?” Paredes asked.

“I saw him,” she cried feverishly, “run from the back of the house and down the path to the lake.  I—­I tried to catch him, but my feet were frozen, and the snow was slippery, and I couldn’t find my shoes.  But I called and he wouldn’t stop.  I had to know, because I wanted to kill him if it was Silas Blackburn.  And I saw him run to the lake and splash in until the water was over his head.”

She flung her clenched hands out.  Her voice became a scream, shot with all her suffering, all her doubt, all her fury.

“You don’t understand.  He can’t be punished.  I tell you he’s at the bottom of the lake with the man he murdered.  And I can’t pay him.  I tried to go after him, but it—­it was too cold.”

She sank in one of the chairs, shaking and sobbing.

“Unless we want another tragedy,” the doctor said, “this woman must be put to bed and taken care of.  She has been terribly exposed.  You’ve heard her.  She’s delirious.”

“Not so delirious that she hasn’t told the truth,” Paredes said.

The doctor lifted her in his arms and with Rawlins’s help carried her upstairs.  Katherine went with them.  Almost immediately the doctor and Rawlins hurried down.

“I have told Katherine what to do,” Doctor Groom said.  “The woman may be all right in the morning.  What’s she been up to here?”

“Then,” Bobby cried, “there was a connection between the dinner party and the murders.  But what about my coming here unconscious?  What about my handkerchief?”

“I can see no answer yet,” Graham said.

Paredes smiled.

“Not when you’ve had the answer to everything?  I have shown you that Silas Blackburn was the murderer.  The fact stared you in the face.  Everything that has happened at the Cedars has pointed to his guilt.”

“Except,” the doctor said, “his own apparent murder which made his guilt seem impossible.  And I’m not sure you’re right now, for there is no other Blackburn he could have murdered, and Blackburns look alike.  You wouldn’t mistake another man for one of them.”

“This house,” Paredes smiled, “has all along been full of the presence of the other Blackburn.  There has been evidence enough for you all to have known he was here.”

He stretched himself in an easy chair.  He lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke toward the ceiling.

“I shall tell you the simple facts, if only to save my skin from this blood-thirsty district attorney.”