Robinson entered.  The flesh around his eyes was puffier than it had been yesterday.  Worry had increased the incongruous discontent of his round face.  Clearly he had slept little.

“I saw you arrive,” he said.  “Rawlins warned me.  But I must say I didn’t think you’d use your freedom to come to us.”

Paredes laughed.

“Since the law won’t hold me at your convenience in Smithtown I keep myself at your service here—­if Bobby permits it.  Could you ask more?”

Bobby shrank from the man with whom he had idled away so much time and money.  That fleeting, satanic impression of yesterday came back, sharper, more alarming.  Paredes’s clear challenge to the district attorney was the measure of his strength.  His mind was subtler than theirs.  His reserve and easy daring mastered them all; and always, as now, he laughed at the futility of their efforts to sound his purposes, to limit his freedom of action.  Bobby didn’t care to meet the uncommunicative eyes whose depths he had never been able to explore.  Was there a special power there that could control the destinies of other people, that might make men walk unconsciously to accomplish the ends of an unscrupulous brain?

The district attorney appeared as much at sea as the others.

“Thanks,” he said dryly to Paredes.

And glancing at Bobby, he asked with a hollow scorn: 

“You’ve no objection to the gentleman visiting you for the present?”

“If he wishes,” Bobby answered, a trifle amused at Robinson’s obvious fancy of a collusion between Paredes and himself.

Robinson jerked his head toward the window.

“I’ve been watching the preparations out there.  I guess when he’s laid away you’ll be thinking about having the will read.”

“No hurry,” Bobby answered with a quick intake of breath.

“I suppose not,” Robinson sneered, “since everybody knows well enough what’s in it.”

Bobby arose.  Robinson still sneered.

“You’ll be at the grave—­as chief mourner?”

Bobby walked from the room.  He hadn’t cared to reply.  He feared, as it was, that he had let slip his increased self-doubt.  He put on his coat and hat and left the house.  The raw cold, the year’s first omen of winter, made his blood run quicker, forced into his mind a cleansing stimulation.  But almost immediately even that prophylactic was denied him.  With his direction a matter of indifference, chance led him into the thicket at the side of the house.  He had walked some distance.  The underbrush had long interposed a veil between him and the Cedars above whose roofs smoke wreathed in the still air like fantastic figures weaving a shroud to lower over the time-stained, melancholy walls.  For once he was grateful to the forest because it had forbidden him to glance perpetually back at that dismal and pensive picture.  Then he became aware of twigs hastily lopped off, of bushes bent and torn,