"I'd rather not say, sir, if you don't mind."
Troubled by an inkling of the disaster, Matthias composed himself to patience.
Turning south on Fifth Avenue, the car passed Thirty-fourth Street before swinging eastward again. It stopped, eventually, in the side street, just short of the corner of Madison Avenue, before a private entrance to a ground-floor apartment, such as physicians prefer. But Matthias could discern no physician's name-plate upon the door at which his guide knocked, or in either of the flanking windows.
Opening, the door disclosed a panelled entry tenanted by a white-lipped woman in the black and white uniform of a lady's-maid. Her frightened eyes examined Matthias apprehensively as he entered, followed by the chauffeur.
This last demanded briefly: "Doctor been?"
The maid assented with a nervous nod: "Ten minutes ago, about. He's with the lady now—"
"Lady!" the chauffeur echoed. "But I thought it was Mr. Marbridge—"
"I mean the other lady," the maid explained—"the one what done the shooting. When Mr. Marbridge got the gun away from her, he locked her up in the bathroom, and then she had hysterics. The doctor's trying to make her hush, so's she won't disturb the other tenants, but.... You can hear yourself how she's carrying on."
In a pause that followed, Matthias was conscious of the sound of high-pitched and incessant laughter, slightly muffled, emanating from some distant part of the flat.
He asked abruptly: "Where is Mr. Marbridge?"