"Don't fight that way. Uncle Silas is dead; Howells has been taken away. The police will find nothing. By and by they will leave. It will all be forgotten. Why should you keep it active and dangerous by trying to find who is guilty?"
"Katherine!" he cried, surprised. "Why do you say that?"
Her hand left his arm. She walked on without answering. Paredes came back to him—Paredes serenely calling attention to the fact that Katherine had alarmed the household and had led it to the discovery of the Cedars's successive mysteries. He shrank from asking her any more.
They left the thicket. In the open space about the house the snow had spread a white mantle. From it the heavy walls rose black and forbidding.
"I don't want to go in," Katherine said.
Their feet lagged as they followed the driveway to the entrance of the court. The curtains of the room of death, they saw, had been raised. A dim, unhealthy light slipped from the small-paned windows across the court, staining the snow. Robinson and Rawlins were probably searching again.
Suddenly Katherine stopped. She pointed.
"What's that?" she asked sharply.
Bobby followed the direction of her glance. He saw a black patch against the wall of the wing opposite the lighted windows.
"It is a shadow," he said.