“Graham and Katherine will be worried.”

They drove quickly away from the black, uncommunicative mass of the abandoned building.  The woods were lonelier than before.  They impressed Bobby as guarding something.

He drove straight to the stable.  As they walked into the court they saw the uncertain candlelight diffused from the room of death.  In the hall Bobby responded to a quick alarm.  The Cedars was too quiet.  What had happened since he and Paredes had left?

“Katherine!  Hartley!” he called.

He heard running steps upstairs.  Katherine leaned over the banister.  Her quiet voice reassured him.  “Is the doctor with you?”

He nodded.  Paredes yawned and lighted a cigarette.  He settled himself in an easy chair.  Bobby and Doctor Groom hurried up.  Katherine led them down the old corridor.  Two chairs had been placed in the broken doorway.  Graham sat there.  He arose and greeted the doctor.

“Nothing has happened since I left?” Bobby asked.

Graham shook his head.

“Katherine and I have watched every minute.”

Doctor Groom walked to the bed and for a long time looked down at Howells.  Once he put out his hand, quickly withdrawing it.

“It’s simply a repetition,” he said at last, and his voice was softer than its custom.  “It may be a warning, for all we know, that no one may sleep in this room without attracting death.  Yet why should that be?  I miss this poor fellow’s materialistic viewpoint.  There’s nothing I can do for him, nothing I can say, except that death must have been instantaneous.  The police must seek again for a man to place in the electric chair.”

Graham touched his arm with an odd reluctance.

“Sitting here for so long I’ve been thinking.  I have always been materialistic, too.  Tell me seriously, doctor, do you believe there is any psychic force capable of killing two men in this incisive fashion?”

“No one,” the doctor answered, “can say what psychic force is capable of doing.  Some scientists have started to explore, but it is still uncharted country.  From certain places—­I daresay you’ve noticed it—­one gets an impression of peace and content; from others a depression, a sense of suffering.  I think we have all experienced psychic force to that extent.  Remember that this room has a history of intense and rebellious suffering.  Some of it I have seen with my own eyes.  Your father’s fight for life, Katherine, was horrible for those of us who knew he had no chance.  As I watched beside him I used to wonder if such violent agony could ever drift wholly into silence, and when we had to tell him finally that the fight was lost, it was beyond bearing.”

“If these men had been found dead without marks of violence,” Graham said, “I might consider such a possibility, irrational as it seems.”