— VI —THE ONE WHO CREPT
IN THE PRIVATE STAIRCASE
The odd, mournful crying lost itself in the restless lament of the wind. The thicket from which it had seemed to issue assumed in the pallid moonlight a new unfriendliness. Instinctively the six men moved closer together. The coroner’s thin tones expressed his alarm:
“What the devil was that? I don’t really believe there could be a woman around here.”
“A queer one!” the detective grunted.
The district attorney questioned Bobby and Graham.
“That’s the voice you heard from the house?”
Graham nodded.
“Perhaps not so far away.”
Doctor Groom, hitherto more captured than any of them by the imminence of a spiritual responsibility for the mystery of the Cedars, was the first now to reach for a rational explanation of this new phase.
“We mu
