"Happy?" roared Bennett, with an explosive affability. "Sir, let me tell you '
"Sh-hh!" said Katharine. "Be dignified. Whee!"
H. M. looked sourly from one to the other. "You practically light up this office. Gives me a pain, that's what it does. Well, I suppose you'd better come in. You two are goin' to get married, ain't you? Haaah! Just wait till you do; that'll fix you. You see if it don't. Haaah!"
"Are you telling me," said Bennett, "that you don't remember we were married a month ago today? I suppose you've also forgotten you gave the bride away? And that Kate stayed with your daughter after good old Uncle Maurice tossed her out of the house?"
"Old Maurice," grunted H. M. His eye twinkled. "Sure, I remember now. Ho ho. Well, now that you're here I suppose you'd better sit down and have a drink. Ho ho. Look here, I certainly put the wind up you two, didn't I? I bet you thought old Uncle Maurice was guilty of that funny business down at the White Priory. How's Paris?"
They sat down on the other side of the desk. Bennett hesitated.
"It's about the funny business," he admitted, "that we wanted to talk to you-in a way. That is. well, we're sailing for New York in a couple of days, and we've got to take back some complete account of it, you know. We've never had the details on account of all the uproar and fuss that happened after Emery's arrest. We know he died in the hospital two days after he fell-or threw himself — down those stairs…"
H. M. inspected his fingers.
"Uh-huh. I was hopin' he'd do somethin' like that. He wasn't a very bad sort, Emery wasn't. Point o' fact, I might 'a' been inclined to let him go after all; I was a bit hesitant about the thing until he murdered Rainger just because Rainger had spotted him. That was mucky. The whole thing was mucky. I didn't hold it much against him for killin' Tait in hot blood. I didn't want to see him hang for that. But the nastiness came out in the other thing… "
"Anyhow, sir, what everybody seems to know is that he killed her with that heavy silvered-steel figure he had on the radiator-cap of his fancy automobile; that is, the one he did have there the first time I saw the car. When he drove out to the White Priory next day, he'd changed it for a bronze stork. I remember noticing that at the time, although it didn't register fully. But what's got everybody up in the air is how you knew all this, how you got on to him in the first place-"