At the office of the Herald , I hunted up the murdered man’s secretary. She was a small girl of nineteen or twenty with wide chestnut eyes, light brown hair and a pale pretty face. Her name was Lewis.

She said she hadn’t known anything about my being called to Personville by her employer.

“But then,” she explained, “ Mr. Willsson always liked to keep everything to himself as long as he could. It was⁠—I don’t think he trusted anybody here, completely.”

“Not you?”

She flushed and said:

“No. But of course he had been here such a short while and didn’t know any of us very well.”

“There must have been more to it than that.”