"Don't make me laugh!" Herrick desolately replied.
She rose. "Then I will say to you what I have long had on my heart." She opened the door. The halls were empty. She turned the key in the lock, and glanced at the closed windows; sitting close to him again she laid a kind hand on his. "Mr. Herrick, there is something wrong with Hermann Deutch. There is something in his mind to make him crazy. And in the last days—say it is two or three—it makes him crazier all the while. Yes, this is so. It is fear. And something that he will not tell. He knows something, and it makes him afraid. It has been so since he went up to the room of Mr. Ingham on that night."
Herrick looked down at her hand and then he put his other hand atop of both and gave hers a little pressure. "Mrs. Deutch, what is it that you know about that night? Don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid for me. What is it?"
"Oh, my young sir, I am ready to tell you. Yesterday, no. But to-day, when all the world has seen the shadow-picture, yes—why not? On that night till very late I was away. For I had a friend with a sick baby, and nurses one can not always pay. When I came to the basement gate there was in our flat no lights. But when I went in there was my husband, with his coat over his shirt, standing, listening, in the dark. And he said, 'Christina is upstairs!'—very cross and ugly. I said, 'At Ingham's? Why, what for?—Why,' I said, before he could tell it to me, 'are you out of your mind that you should let her go up there with that man at midnight?' He said, 'Tell me the one thing. How would you have prevented her from going up?'"
They smiled at one another, ruefully, as at an evocation of Christina.
"'Oh, my God!' he cries out. 'There is going to be trouble! Mr. Denny, he has found out why she quarreled with that Ingham, yesterday. She says he will kill him. She wants that Ingham should go away.'"
"Do you know why they did quarrel?"
"No, neither of us. Never at all.—But then, I started to go up to her, by the freight elevator as he had taken her. Down that back hall we did not hear the shot. But the telephone made us halt. Joe told us."
The clasp of Herrick's hand lent her its reassurance and she went on.
"My husband was all at once like a man in a fit. He seemed to have no head. He is not to say fearful, but he is the way men are. 'Go!' I said, 'Hasten! It may be that it is he who himself shot!' And this gave him heart to go upstairs. Then comes to me Christina, slipping along from the back. I saw her white dress in the dark. And then she came into a little patch of light and put her finger to her lips. I ran and pulled her in and shut the door. And I took her in my arms to warm her, for she was made all of ice. 'Is he dead?' I asked her. And she shivered out, 'Oh, a doctor! Get a doctor! Go up to him, Tante Deutch! And hurry!' she would say, 'Hurry!' But, indeed, I thought there was enough with him. I asked her the one thing: 'Who did it?' She looked at me with her lips all wide apart. But not a name would she breathe out. Neither then nor to this day. And by that I knew it was Mr. Denny. For no man but him would she be so still. Or not then, when you she did not yet know."