me. A question was twisting the little man’s lips, but I headed it off with a statement:
“It’s done.”
“Bravo!” he exclaimed as we went into the library. “You hear that, my darling? It is done!”
His darling, sitting by the table, where she had sat the other night, smiled with no expression in her doll’s face, and murmured, “Oh, yes,” with no expression in her words.
I went to the table and emptied my pockets of money.
“Nineteen thousand, one hundred and twenty-six dollars and seventy cents, including the stamps,” I announced. “The other eight hundred and seventy-three dollars and thirty cents is gone.”
“Ah!” Bruno Gungen stroked his spade-shaped black beard with a trembling pink hand and pried into my face with hard bright eyes. “And where did you find it? By all means sit down and tell us the tale. We are famished with eagerness for it, eh, my love?”
His love yawned, “Oh, yes!”
“There isn’t much story,” I said. “To recover the money I had to make a bargain, promising silence. Main was robbed Sunday afternoon. But it happens that we couldn’t convict the robbers if we had them. The only person who could identify them—won’t.”
“But who killed Jeffrey?” The little man was pawing my chest with both pink hands. “Who killed him that night?”
“Suicide. Despair at being robbed under circumstances he couldn’t explain.”