On his own curb stood a line of men, staring at the windows of 4-B as if they expected the tragedy to be reënacted for their benefit. They all turned their attention greedily to Herrick as he came up, and the nearest man said, "Have they got him?"
"Him?"
"Why, the murderer!"
"Oh!" Herrick said. Even in the crude excitement of the question the man's voice was so pleasant and his enunciation so agreeably clear that Herrick, constitutionally sensitive to voices and rather weary for the sound of cultivated speech, replied familiarly, "I'm afraid, strictly speaking, that there isn't any murderer. It's supposed to be a woman."
"Indeed! Well, have they caught her?"
"They've caught no one. And, after all, there seems to be some hope that it's a suicide."
"Oh!" said the other, with a smile. "Then you found him in evening dress! I've noticed that bodies found in evening dress are always supposed to be suicides!"
The note of laughter jarred. "I see nothing remarkable," Herrick rebuked him, with considerable state, "in his having on dinner clothes."
"Nothing whatever! 'Dinner clothes'—I accept the correction. Any poor fellow having them on, a night like this, might well commit suicide!—I'm obliged to you," he nodded. And, humming, went slowly down the street.
Herrick suddenly hated him; and then he saw how sore and savage he was from the whole affair. The same automobile still waited, not far from his own door, and he longed to leap into it and send it rapid as fury through the night, leaving all this doubt and horror behind him in the cramped town. His troubled apprehension did not believe in that suicide.—What sort of a woman was she? And what deviltry or what despair had driven her to a deed like that? Where and how—in God's name, how!—had she fled? He, too, looked up at that window where he had seen the lights go out. It was brightly enough lighted, now. But this time there was no blind drawn and no shadow. The bare front of the house baulked the curiosity on fire in him. "How the devil and all did she get out?" It was more than curiosity; it was interest, a kind of personal excitement. That strange, imperial, and passionate gesture! The woman who made it had killed that man. Of one thing he was sure. "If ever I see it again, I shall know her," he said, "among ten thousand!"