Jaspar explained:
"No—It wasn't that window. He went to the floor below, the seventeenth. The janitor, going up there an hour afterward, found the hall window on the seventeenth floor wide open."
"That's an odd thing," I said—"going down one story."
"You can't apply the ordinary rules of behavior to men in Harland's state," said Jones. "They're way off the normal. I remember one of my first details was the suicide of a woman, who killed herself by swallowing a key when she had a gun handy. They get wild and act wild."
Yerrington, who was famous for injecting a sinister note into the most commonplace happenings, spoke up:
"The window's easily explained. What is queer is the length of time that elapsed between his leaving the office and his fall to the street. That Franks girl, when she wasn't whooping like a siren in a fog, said it was 6.05 when he went out. At twenty-five to seven the body fell—half an hour later." He looked at me with a dark glance. "What did he do during that time?"
"I'll tell you in two words," said Jaspar. "Stop and think for a moment. What was that man's mental state? He's ruined—he's played a big game and lost. But life's been sweet to him—up till now it's given him everything he asked for. There's a struggle between the knowledge that death is the best way out and the desire to live."
"To express it in language more suited to our simple intellects," said Jones, "he's taken half an hour to make up his mind."
"Precisely."
"Where did he spend that half hour?" said Yerrington, in a deep, meaningful voice.