The detective alone maintained his attitude unchanged.

“You come with me, Wells,” he ordered, with a jerk of his thumb toward the door.  “This time I’ll do the locking up.”

The Doctor, head bowed, prepared to obey.  The detective took up a candle to light their path.  Then he turned to the others for a moment.

“Better get the young lady to bed,” he said with a gruff kindliness of manner.  “I think that I can promise you a quiet night from now on.”

“I’m glad you think so, Mr. Anderson!” Miss Cornelia insisted on the last word.  The detective ignored the satiric twist of her speech, motioned the Doctor out ahead of him, and followed.  The faint glow of his candle flickered a moment and vanished toward the stairs.

It was Bailey who broke the silence.

“I can believe a good bit about Wells,” he said, “but not that he stood on that staircase and killed Dick Fleming.”

Miss Cornelia roused from deep thought.

“Of course not,” she said briskly.  “Go down and fix Miss Dale’s bed, Lizzie.  And then bring up some wine.”

“Down there, where the Bat is?” Lizzie demanded.

“The Bat has gone.”

“Don’t you believe it.  He’s just got his hand in!”

But at last Lizzie went, and, closing the door behind her, Miss Cornelia proceeded more or less to think, out loud.

“Suppose,” she said, “that the Bat, or whoever it was shut in there with you, killed Richard Fleming.  Say that he is the one Lizzie saw coming in by the terrace door.  Then he knew where the money was for he went directly up the stairs.  But that is two hours ago or more.  Why didn’t he get the money, if it was here, and get away?”

“He may have had trouble with the combination.”

“Perhaps.  Anyhow, he was on the small staircase when Dick Fleming started up, and of course he shot him.  That’s clear enough.  Then he finally got the safe open, after locking us in below, and my coming up interrupted him.  How on earth did he get out on the roof?”

Bailey glanced out the window.

“It would be possible from here.  Possible, but not easy.”

“But, if he could do that,” she persisted, “he could have got away, too.  There are trellises and porches.  Instead of that he came back here to this room.”  She stared at the window.  “Could a man have done that with one hand?”

“Never in the world.”

Saying nothing, but deeply thoughtful, Miss Cornelia made a fresh progress around the room.

“I know very little about bank-currency,” she said finally.  “Could such a sum as was looted from the Union Bank be carried away in a man’s pocket?”

Bailey considered the question.

“Even in bills of large denomination it would make a pretty sizeable bundle,” he said.

But that Miss Cornelia’s deductions were correct, whatever they were, was in question when Lizzie returned with the elderberry wine.  Apparently Miss Cornelia was to be like the man who repaired the clock:  she still had certain things left over.