Mr. Hardwick drew himself up. His face brightened with affection and the pride of parenthood as he gazed at his daughter’s figure, straight and slender and strong as the trunk of a young birch. Her simple frock of white taffeta with touches of coral at the waist possessed that subtle individual charm which fashion designers can only imitate. Her dark, loosely coiled hair, with stray wisps caressing her healthily tanned cheeks, seemed in constant mutiny against the petty tyrannies of hairdressers.

“I might have known something was to happen.” Mr. Hardwick’s tones were gently playful, as if he were anxious to turn his daughter’s thoughts from the tragedy. “Something always happens where you are. You are a storm petrel, my dear.”

“I was born under Uranus, you know. That explains everything.” She smiled whimsically. There was a touch of the child in the firm oval of her face and the smooth curves of mouth and nose, but the deep-brown eyes held a surprising store of worldly wisdom. She quite baffled her father at times. The impulses of April and June seemed to be constantly clashing within her, and they filled his autumnal days with a never-ending round of surprises.

“I wonder,” he said, eyeing her curiously as a new thought came to him, “whether Uranus had anything to do with your leaving the box just before—before it happened.”

“It’s always safe to blame Uranus,” she parried. “He is such a convenient scapegoat. I don’t know what I would do if——”

She was grateful for the interruption that came just then. The law was already at work, and she sat back and watched the swift precision of its mechanism. Two policemen, one heavy and red-faced, the other lean and sharp-visaged, walked into the theater and stationed themselves beside the body with the air of zealots guarding the coffin of Mohammed. She gathered from the few words they exchanged with Starr that a cordon had been thrown around the building a minute and a half after the call reached the precinct station. They were followed shortly by a puffy little man who let it be known that he was a deputy from the office of the chief medical examiner. The latter had barely begun the usual inspection of the body when two other men entered the auditorium.

One of them, barrel-chested and somewhat pompous in his manners, seemed to be a representative of the district attorney’s office. The other, angular and as loose-jointed as a marionette, with lazy, cinnamon-colored eyes and a complexion that seemed to indicate that he drank too much coffee and smoked too many cigars, was recognized by Helen at first glance. Uranus had brought them together once before. She remembered that his name was Lieutenant Culligore, and that he was attached to the homicide squad of the detective bureau. As his glance flitted slowly over the room, his mind seemed to register each detail without slightest effort. Helen noticed that he gazed at her a trifle longer than on the others, but his face betrayed no recognition.

Then began the questioning, conducted by the stout man from the district attorney’s office, while Lieutenant Culligore made an occasional jotting in his notebook. The members of the audience were interrogated briefly and pointedly, and each one in turn was permitted to depart after leaving his or her name and address. Helen marveled at the matter-of-factness of it all. It seemed almost ruthless, this volleying of questions over a body which was scarcely cold, but she recognized the brisk efficiency with which the procedure was carried out. None of the witnesses had much to tell that was significant, and the only important points brought out were the dying woman’s strange laugh and her mention of Mr. Shei.

Culligore, as was his habit when impressed, curled up his lip under the tip of his nose when these facts were stated, and the stout man raised his brows and nodded grimly.

“Looks as though Mr. Shei had been up to another of his little tricks,” he muttered.

Culligore pursed his lips and chewed a dead cigar. There was a slow twinkle in his eyes which seemed to say that life wasn’t quite so serious as it seemed, despite the sordid and ugly affairs with which he came in daily touch.

Helen did not know how it happened, but the house was almost empty when her turn to be questioned came. Her face showed no sign of the trepidation she felt as she stepped forward. She knew, as she turned her face toward the stout man, that three pairs of eyes were watching her with more than ordinary intentness—her father’s, Lieutenant Culligore’s, and Vincent Starr’s.

The stout man gave her a listless look as he inquired her name and address. She fancied he was sniffing inwardly, and that after looking her over he had decided that she probably could give no information beside what had already been brought out. At any rate, his questions were few and perfunctory and gave her no opportunity to practice the evasions she had mentally rehearsed while the others were being questioned. As she turned away, she saw a mildly reproachful look in her father’s face and one of amused understanding in Culligore’s.

“Well, doctor?” The stout man turned on the medical examiner, whose rubicund face wore a puzzled scowl. “What do you make of it?”

The examiner wagged his head. Being a man of science, he was strongly averse to forming hasty conclusions.

“There is an abrasion on the right arm that might have been caused by a hypodermic syringe,” he announced.

“And the laugh—how do you account for that?”

“I am not accounting for it, but there are certain drugs that produce exhilaration and laughter. Most of them have to be taken into the system by inhalation, however, in order to produce such an effect.”

“I see.” The stout man looked a bit impatient. “In plain words, then, it’s a case of murder?”

“I wouldn’t say that. It might prove a far-fetched guess.”

“All quibbling aside, don’t the scratch on her arm look as though somebody had shot a dose of poison into her with a needle?”

The examiner pondered. “It could mean that, but it doesn’t necessarily follow. An autopsy will be necessary to establish the exact cause of death. Why should a murderer use a hypodermic injection when there are so many simpler and easier ways of accomplishing the same result?”

The stout man guffawed. “Mr. Shei never picks the simple and easy way. When he wants to pull off a crime, he always dresses it up in flossy trimmings. And he always plays safe. Now, my idea is that the safest thing in the world to kill a person with is a hypodermic syringe. It makes no noise, there’s no smoke, no bullet, no powder marks, no anything, and it don’t leave any clews behind.”

The examiner smiled skeptically, as if he had his own views on the subject. “The autopsy will tell. What I fail to understand is why you seem so certain that Mr. Shei, as he calls himself, has had a hand in this affair.”

“Miss Darrow saw him, didn’t she?”

“She called out his name, if I understood the witnesses correctly, but she did not say she had seen him. It’s possible she imagined she saw him. The same drugs that produce exhilaration and laughter also produce hallucinations. However,” and he pulled a cigar from his pocket and lighted it carefully, “whether Miss Darrow did or did not see Mr. Shei is for you gentlemen to decide. Good-night.”

He strode out. The stout man made a wry face and stroked his chin. Evidently the medical man had given him something to think about. Helen, too, had found food for reflection in the doctor’s statement. She stood beside her father a few feet from the others. She had remained for no other reason than a feeling that Culligore, who had been watching her covertly from time to time, might try to detain her if she made a move to go. She believed the lieutenant had rightly guessed that she had not told all she knew.

Starr, who had unobtrusively slipped out