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anything,” Steve Donaldson said brusquely. He started to go on, and stopped. He had not taken his eyes off Colonel Primrose, still standing by the telephone. I saw something flicker in the bright black eyes Colonel Primrose turned to him.
    “The fewer conclusions anybody jumps at the better, Mr. Donaldson,” he said, with a restrained suavity that I’m sure must have taken some effort.
    Steve Donaldson flushed darkly. He took a step closer to Iris. He was behind her, so she could not know, I thought suddenly, how much like a sword and shield he looked, looming there, in spite of his white tie and tails. Nor could Colonel Primrose have known how much to the point what he had just said was going to be.
    Outside the sound of a car stopping, followed by heavy feet stamping off the snow on the porch, brought us all sharply to attention. Colonel Primrose went to the door and opened it. I heard a low rumble of voices, and in a moment there were four sober-faced keen-eyed men in the room, two of whom we were to see a lot of before we were through with Randall Nash. I had never seen any of them, so I knew they weren’t from the Seventh Precinct Headquarters in Volta Place. They all seemed to know Colonel Primrose.
    One of them, the surgeon obviously, came forward with his black bag and knelt beside Randall Nash. He straightened up in a minute, put his stethoscope back in his inside pocket and glanced up at Colonel Primrose, drawing his thin lower lip under his long teeth with an odd sucking sound.
    At that point, I suppose, the die was cast already, and nothing could have saved us from any part of the fate that seemed to be hanging on the footsteps of everyone who entered the yellow brick house on Beall Street, dogging it as relentlessly as if the awful crime of that long dead Nash had laid on it a curse for which only blood could atone. And yet… I have nothing but admiration and respect for the District of Columbia police. I doubt if anywhere in the world any group of men handed the job that Captain Lamb and his men were handed that night would have done it better, or with more devotion not only to duty but to decency. But if they were human, they couldn’t possibly have failed to be affected by the sudden and appallingly dramatic entrance on the scene that happened at the very moment Dr. Maxton folded his stethoscope and looked up, sucking in his lower lip.
    We were all so shocked at what was going on in front of us that none of us—except, I suppose, Colonel Primrose, who always notices everything, and perhaps Captain Lamb—heard the front door open and saw Lowell Nash come in. And I doubt if even they saw Mac there behind her. She must have stood in the doorway for a long moment, taking in the dreadful significance of what was going on for instants, before she shot forward, dropping her red velvet evening coat off her shoulders to the floor as she came, sure and swift and razor-sharp, her dark eyes burning and all the color drained from her cheeks, facing her stepmother.
    Her voice came out low and hard and cruel: “Then you did poison him… and you’ve poisoned my father too!”
    Even Colonel Primrose caught his breath sharply. I didn’t dare look at any of the others. I couldn’t blame them for thinking anything. The searing icy hatred in Lowell Nash’s voice was enough to curdle anyone’s blood. And she was almost unbelievably lovely to look at, in a low-cut flame-colored dance frock with a skirt of yards and yards of crisp net swirling about her young body as she moved, and above it each black curl sculptured close to her small elegant head like the locks of a young Medusa. That’s what she seemed too, just then: a young Medusa, not knowing her power, turning every one of us to stone.
    Then as suddenly she broke away and flung herself down beside her father.
    “Dad! Dad! Oh, it’s Lowell! Answer me—answer me, daddy!”
    She burst into a torrent of weeping, her dark head on the stiff starched bosom of his