"And for those two days I've been outside here waiting for somebody to
come because I daren't go inside by myself. Two days! Two days!" she
repeated, her teeth chattering.

Max looked at her with mixed feelings of doubt, pity and astonishment.
It was too dark in the ill-lighted passage for him to see all the
details of her appearance. She was young, quite young; so much was
certain. She looked white and pinched and miserably cold. Her dress was
respectable, very plain, and bore marks of her climbing and crawling
over the timber on the wharf.

"Won't you go in with me?" she asked again, more eagerly, more
tremulously than before. "I can show you the road--round at the back.
You will have a little climbing to do, but you won't mind that."

"But what do you want me to do if I do get inside?" said Max. "It's the
police you ought to send for, if a man has died in there. Go to the
police station and give information."

The girl shook her head.

"I can't do that," she whispered. Then, after a shuddering pause, she
came a step nearer and said, in a lower whisper than ever: "He didn't
die--of his own accord. He was murdered."

Max grew hot, and cold. He heartily wished he had never come.

"All the more reason," he went on in a blustering voice, "why you should
inform the police. You had better lose no time about it."