Lida sent for me at once.  I had only time to dry my eyes and straighten my hat.  Had I met Alma on the stairs, I would have passed her without a word.  She would not have known me.  But I saw no one.

Lida was in bed.  She was lying there with a rose-shaded lamp beside her, and a great bowl of spring flowers on a little stand at her elbow.  She sat up when I went in, and had a maid place a chair for me beside the bed.  She looked very childish, with her hair in a braid on the pillow, and her slim young arms and throat bare.

“I’m so glad you came!” she said, and would not be satisfied until the light was just right for my eyes, and my coat unfastened and thrown open.

“I’m not really ill,” she informed me.  “I’m—­I’m just tired and nervous, and—­and unhappy, Mrs. Pitman.”

“I am sorry,” I said.  I wanted to lean over and pat her hand, to draw the covers around her and mother her a little,—­I had had no one to mother for so long,—­but I could not.  She would have thought it queer and presumptuous—­or no, not that.  She was too sweet to have thought that.

“Mrs. Pitman,” she said suddenly, “who was this Jennie Brice?”

“She was an actress.  She and her husband lived at my house.”

“Was she—­was she beautiful?”

“Well,” I said slowly, “I never thought of that.  She was handsome, in a large way.”

“Was she young?”

“Yes.  Twenty-eight or so.”

“That isn’t very young,” she said, looking relieved.  “But I don’t think men like very young women.  Do you?”

“I know one who does,” I said, smiling.  But she sat up in bed suddenly and looked at me with her clear childish eyes.

“I don’t want him to like me!” she flashed.  “I—­I want him to hate me.”

“Tut, tut!  You want nothing of the sort.”

“Mrs. Pitman,” she said, “I sent for you because I’m nearly crazy.  Mr. Howell was a friend of that woman.  He has acted like a maniac since she disappeared.  He doesn’t come to see me, he has given up his work on the paper, and I saw him to-day on the street—­he looks like a ghost.”

That put me to thinking.

“He might have been a friend,” I admitted.  “Although, as far as I know, he was never at the house but once, and then he saw both of them.”

“When was that?”

“Sunday morning, the day before she disappeared.  They were arguing something.”

She was looking at me attentively.  “You know more than you are telling me, Mrs. Pitman,” she said.  “You—­do you think Jennie Brice is dead, and that Mr. Howell knows—­who did it?”

“I think she is dead, and I think possibly Mr. Howell suspects who did it.  He does not know, or he would have told the police.”

“You do not think he was—­was in love with Jennie Brice, do you?”

“I’m certain of that,” I said.  “He is very much in love with a foolish girl, who ought to have more faith in him than she has.”