“I don’t know.”
“How do you explain away his written confession?”
“I don’t. I only know that it was not in Ned Worth’s character willfully to kill an old man. You were his friend; you ought to know it as well as I do.”
“Ah, that’s different,” said the Little Red Doctor, giving me one of his queer looks. “Yes; you’re a pig-headed old man, Dominie.”
“I’m a believer in character.”
“I don’t know of any other man equally pig-headed, except possibly one. He’s old, too.”
“Gale Sheldon,” said I, naming the gentle, withered librarian of a branch library a few blocks to the westward, the only other resident of Our Square who had unfailingly supported me in my loyalty to the memory of the last of the Worths.
“Yes. He’s waiting for us now in his rooms. Will you come?”
Perceiving that there was something back of this—there usually is, in the Little Red Doctor’s maneuvers—I rose and we set out. As we passed the Worth house it seemed grimmer and bleaker than ever before. There was something savage and desperate in its desolation. The cold curse of abandonment lay upon it. At the turn of the corner the Little Red Doctor said abruptly.
“She’s dead.”