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was good to feel the clean snow on her face. Fresh air to breathe. Back there…
    Yet somehow, strangely, there was a quality of furtiveness in their cautious steps. Of flight, of escape.
    She fell to shivering again, violently.
    “Dennis—who killed him?”
    “I don’t know, Daphne. I don’t know.”
    “Why?”
    “Why was he killed?” He considered it, guiding her down that slippery little path and below the thick, crowding shadows of the firs through snow that went between the straps of her slippers and was icy and cold around her silk ankles. “How can I tell?” he said finally, wearily. “Wait here a second.” They waited, listening. There was no sound at all. The snow muffled the sound of their steps as they emerged cautiously from the path onto the driveway, with the black shadow of the house ahead and its many unseen windows.
    “Walk lightly,” Dennis whispered so close to her ear she could feel his lips and his warm breath.
    And the caution roused her suddenly to a new and disquieting thought, and that was the thought of immediate, unseen danger. Danger because murder had walked in that night of blackness and of swirling snow that muffled all sounds and made them secret. And murder has its own secret terror.
    The firs were thick along the drive, and there were tall clumps of shrubs all about—any of them tall enough and thick enough to conceal a man. And if the snow muffled her light footsteps and Dennis’, it would also muffle another’s footsteps.
    They reached the deeper shadow of the entrance. Directly above was the great window, dark now and almost invisible, which commanded a view of the entrance. There were steps, and Dennis’ hand was on the cold latch of the door. Her face was wet with snow: all around them were those flying, bewildering veils.
    “Where’s your key, Daph?” he whispered.
    It was a wrench to go back to that time when she had left that door.
    “Key? But I had no key, Dennis. I unlocked the door. It’s a night latch. The door is heavy, you know. Push harder.”
    He pushed harder. Swore and worked the latch. Turned finally and put his hand on her shoulder with a queerly desperate grip.
    “You must have the key, Daph. You must have it. Good God, I’ve got to get you back into the house. You don’t understand—you are so stunned by this that you haven’t had—all along while Rowley and I were talking—the faintest notion of the things we are, all of us, going to be plunged into. Daph—oh, my darling, you must have the key.”
    But she hadn’t it.
    And the door was locked now and would not open.

Chapter 4
    I T WAS DENNIS WHO found the open window. A drawing-room window it was; one that was actually one of the two french windows, reaching to the floor. The altar for the wedding was to be there; before the windows ferns and tall jars of chrysanthemums were already arranged. The pungent odor of the flowers crept through the well of darkness beyond the open window.
    “It was unlatched,” whispered Dennis. “Florists forgot it, I suppose. In you go, Daph—wait!”
    In the cold darkness he took her suddenly in his arms.
    “My dear, I love you so,” he said. “Somehow, someway we’ll come through it all right. Don’t forget that.” He kissed her, too—not as he had kissed her earlier that night in the hot little library, while that table laden with wedding presents winked and glistened and made an accusing witness, but soberly, gravely. “Go to your room at once,” he said. “You’ll be all right. Try to sleep—if you have any sleeping powder, take it. I’ll manage to see you before anybody comes to question you. Don’t wait, Daph—for the love of God, do as I say.”
    She was inside, out of the snow, and Dennis on the outside was carefully, very cautiously closing the window again. He was gone suddenly into the snow, so she could no longer see the dim outline of his figure.
    But he had to go back to Rowley, of course. Rowley waiting beside that in the