“Sometimes, daddy dear, you show a wonderful understanding of things that have nothing to do with Assyriology.”
“I was right, then.” His face sobered. “I hope you realize that, despite The Gray Phantom’s admirable qualities, there is a gulf between him and you. But you are just as level-headed as was your mother, and I have no fear that the impulses of your heart will get the better of your judgment. We were discussing Mr. Shei. There seems to be a striking similarity between his methods and those of The Gray Phantom, except that the latter was never known to stoop to murder.” He paused for a moment and studied her averted face. “You puzzled me last night, dear. You will admit that your conduct was—er, peculiar.”
“It’s getting late, dad,” murmured Helen, a bit confusedly glancing at her wrist watch. “You should have been at your office half an hour ago. And this is the first time I’ve known you to take an interest in a murder case.”
“Once during the evening you gripped my hand and tried to point out something to me,” pursued Mr. Hardwick, heedless of her remark. “You spoke incoherently, and I had not the faintest idea what it was about. Then, a minute or so before the tragedy, you left the box and hurried away. Still later, while the officer was questioning you, I felt you were concealing something.”
Helen, her fingers tightening about a fork handle, shook her head. “I answered every question he put to me.”
“I know, dear. Yet you withheld a secret of some kind from him.”
“Not exactly. I—I merely refrained from telling him something that—that I might have told.”
“Something you had heard or seen?”
She hesitated for an instant. “If I had told all I had seen and heard, I wouldn’t have been telling half of what I knew.”
Mr. Hardwick leaned back against the chair and pondered this cryptic statement. He seemed puzzled rather than hurt by his daughter’s evasive answers. Suddenly she looked up, saw the troubled expression in his face, and impulsively pushed back her chair and ran up behind him.