disturbed."

Doctor Groom, a grim and dark man, had grown silent on entering the room.
For a long time he stared at the body in the candle light, making as much
of an examination as he could, evidently, without physical contact.

"Why did he ever come here to sleep?" he asked in his rumbling bass
voice. "Nasty room! Unhealthy room! Ten to one you're a formality,
policeman. Coroner's a formality."

He sneered a little.

"I daresay he died what the hard-headed world will call a natural death.
Wonder what the coroner'll say."

The detective didn't answer. He shot rapid, uneasy glances about the room
in which a single candle burned. After a time he said with an accent of
complete conviction:

"That man was murdered."

Perhaps the doctor's significant words, added to her earlier dread of the
abnormal, made Katherine read in the detective's manner an apprehension
of conditions unfamiliar to the brutal routine of his profession. Her
glances were restless, too. She had a feeling that from the shadowed
corners of the faded, musty room invisible faces mocked the man's
stubbornness.

All this she recited to Bobby when, under extraordinary circumstances
neither of them could have foreseen, he arrived at the Cedars many