"If I could be of any service to you I'd be only too glad. But"—she gave that little shrug of her shoulders—"I'm so unimportant. A poor working woman whose orbit happened by chance to cross those of two great luminaries."
"There's nothing for anybody to do but us," said George, standing behind her and holding out her coat. "And we'll do it. You'll see some morning in the paper that we've got our hands on Barker—the high-class sneak."
He and his father worked so well together that he told me afterward he knew the old man would be watching her. He was and so was I, and at those words I saw the rich color spread to her forehead and again that flash, like a leap of flame, shine in her eyes. She knew it too and dropped her lids over it, but the color she couldn't control and it glowed in crimson on her cheeks as she answered with a sort of soft tolerance:
"Oh, Mr. Whitney, hunting criminals has made you unjust." Then as the coat slipped on she flashed a look at him over her shoulder, "But I don't think it's real! The profession requires a pose."
George was quite bowled over. He had no answer and she knew it, turning from him with a smile and moving toward the door. Halfway there the old man stopped her.
"Oh, by the way—one thing more that nearly slipped my memory. You no doubt saw in the papers that Harland is supposed to have spent the half-hour before he jumped, in the corridor of your floor. Did you see him there—as you left, I mean?"
"I?" she raised her eyebrows in artless, surprised query. "No, I'd gone before he came down. I left about six, or maybe a little before."
"Um!" he nodded. "You were probably in the elevator."
"Yes, probably—" her purse dropped from her hand to the floor. We all started forward to pick it up but she was too quick for us and had it before any of us could reach it. As she righted herself from the sudden stoop her face was deeply flushed. "Yes, of course, I must have been in the elevator," she finished with a slight gasp as if the quick movement had impeded her breathing.
"I see, of course," agreed the chief moving beside her to the door. "It merely interested me as a student of morbid psychology. I'd like to have known how a man of Harland's type looked, moved, comported himself, while such a struggle went on in his mind."