Miss Weeks, seeing the difference in him, and seeing too, that the doorway was now clear of the wondering, awestruck group which had previously blocked it, bowed her slight body and proceeded to withdraw; but the judge, staying her by a gesture, she waited patiently near one of the book-racks against which she had stumbled, to hear what he had to say.

“I must have had an attack of some kind,” he calmly remarked.  “Will you be good enough to explain exactly what occurred here that I may more fully comprehend my own misfortune and the death of this faithful friend?”

Then she saw that his faculties were now fully restored, and came a step forward.  But before she could begin her story, he added this searching question: 

“Was it he who let you in—­you and others—­I think you said others?  Was it he who unlocked my gates?”

Miss Weeks sighed and betrayed fluster.  It was not easy to relate her story; besides it was wofully incomplete.  She knew nothing of what had happened down town, she could only tell what had passed before her eyes.  But there was one thing she could make clear, to him, and that was how the seemingly impassable gates had been made ready for the woman’s entrance and afterwards taken such advantage of by herself and others.  A pebble had done it all,—­a pebble placed in the gateway by Bela’s hands.

As she described this, and insisted upon the fact in face of the judge’s almost frenzied disclaimer, she thought she saw the hair move on his forehead.  Bela a traitor, and in the interests of the woman who had fronted him from the other end of the room at the moment consciousness had left him!  Evidently this intrusive little body did not know Bela or his story, or—­

Why should interruption come then?  Why was he stopped, when in the passion of the moment, he might have let fall some word of enlightenment which would have eased the agitated curiosity of the whole town!  Miss Weeks often asked herself this question, and bewailed the sudden access of sounds in the rooms without, which proclaimed the entrance of the police and put a new strain upon the judge’s faculty of self-control and attention to the one matter in hand.

The commonplaces of an official inquiry were about to supersede the play of a startled spirit struggling with a problem of whose complexities he had received but a glimpse.

V

“She wore purple”

The library again! but how changed!  Evening light now instead of blazing sunshine; and evening light so shaded that the corners seemed far and the many articles of furniture, cumbering the spaces between, larger for the shadows in which they stood hidden.  Perhaps the man who sat there in company with the judge regretted this.  Perhaps, he would have preferred to see more perfectly that portion of the room where Bela had taken his stand and finally fallen.  It would have been interesting to note whether the screen had been replaced before the mysterious door which this most devoted of servants had protected to his last gasp.  Curiosity is admissible, even in a man, when the cause is really great.