getting it. So he tried to divert the garrulous lady:

“That’s Miss Saunders and Miss Tracy out there looking at the sunset.”

Mrs. Cornell answered with emphasis:

“Yes, they’re friends.”

“Aren’t you all?”

“Some of us knew each other before we came here,” was her cryptic reply. Then she added pensively: “Six months ago you’d never have found Sybil Saunders looking at a sunset. She was the brightest thing!”

“Awful misfortune that what happened to her.”

She gave a derisive sound at the inadequacy of the word:

“Hah—awful! Took the heart right out of her. If you ever saw a girl in love it was she—bound up in him. Everything ready, the wedding [Pg 49]day set, the trousseau made.” Tears rose in her eyes and she dove into her tight bodice for a handkerchief. “Never to be worn, Mr. Shine—that’s life.”

[Pg 49]

Shine gave forth sympathetic murmurs and Mrs. Cornell, dabbing at her eyes, furnished data between the dabs:

“Two men drinking too much and then a fight, and before anybody knew, murder! If there hadn’t been a brass candlestick near Jim Dallas’ hand it would never have happened. Honest to God, Mr. Shine, there was nothing evil in that young man. But the Parkinson family are camped on his trail. The evil’s in them, if you ask me, with their rewards and detectives.”

“I wonder if she knows where he is.”

“I guess there’s more than one wondering that,” the lady murmured.

“Terribly hard position for her if she does know—or if she doesn’t.”

Shine looked at the page’s figure on the rock. She carried the thing stamped on her face. He [Pg 50]had noticed it particularly where he had taken the photographs of her in the living-room. They were time exposures with his small camera, attempts to catch her fragile prettiness in artistic combinations of light and shade. Once or twice the mask had been dropped and he had seen the 

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