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time it happened, when I was so sure what it was, I— I got rid of the others—the whole batch. Except the gardener, old Jonas.”
    Jonas had been on the place at least twenty-five years; he lived in the village; he turned up during the summer months at some mysteriously early hour not far from dawn, was about the place all day and vanished again mysteriously after dark. Winter months he came at least once a day, to see that marauders hadn’t broken into the then closed and shuttered house or that the pier hadn’t been swept away by ice. It was fantastic to consider Jonas in the role of arsenic poisoner.
    But if not Jonas—Search refused to finish it.
    “How did you get rid of the other servants?”
    “I told Diana they were wasteful,” said Ludmilla, displaying an unexpected canniness. She sighed and flushed a little. “Three times I went down and turned on the electric range and let it burn all night; twice I turned over perfume—the most expensive Diana had. I—I did several little things like that. After a few days she dismissed the whole lot of them and sent to Chicago for a new set. But—but it didn’t make any difference.” The guilty, half-ashamed flush left her face and it looked a little bleak and something frightened and childlike peered from her china-blue eyes. “It was two weeks after that that—it happened again. That was when I sent for the doctor. It isn’t the servants. And—and I’m afraid it isn’t accident, Search. Nobody else was sick.”
    Search moistened her lips. Presently she said rather huskily: “How was it—done?”
    “I think it was put in my food when I had meals, as I so often do, on a tray. I—I don’t know how, unless the tray was left, every time, on the hall table for a moment. Arsenic—they say arsenic hasn’t much taste.”
    “Didn’t the doctor advise you to—to do something? The police …”
    Ludmilla’s small hands closed over her own again. Suddenly the childishness left her eyes; she said soberly and sadly, like an old woman: “How could I go to the police? Diana, Calvin, Richard? Richard’s wife.”
    Search said slowly: “Eve has come back. She arrived a few minutes ago.”
    Ludmilla sat up straight. “Eve! But she was going to divorce him. I was so glad.”
    “She’s changed her mind.”
    “You don’t mean …” Ludmilla’s eyes were sharply anxious. “But she’s ruining his life! We can’t let her do this. She doesn’t love him. She—oh, Search, his marriage was a terrible mistake. I love Richard. I love you. I brought you up—you and Richard and Diana. Diana”—she lifted her plump shoulders—“Diana’s life is exactly right for her. And she’s very generous with her money. She supports me; she gives me anything I want; I live entirely on her bounty, and she never reminds me of it.”
    “Her money came from your brother,” Search reminded her. “And we all owe you—Richard and Diana and I—”
    “Well,” said Ludmilla, “I’m not ungrateful to Diana. But—she’s happy. She loves the things she has—money and power and—and possessions. She loves to do things for people,” said Ludmilla a little dryly. “And she’s very ambitious for Calvin. But—I wanted you and Richard to have a different kind of happiness. Diana’s coldly and perfectly satisfied; she’s got everything she wants and intends to keep it. But Richard and you”—there was a wistful look in Ludmilla’s face—“I wanted other things for you both. Eve is a tragedy for Richard. Yet you are all grown now, and I’m an old woman. There’s nothing I can do.” Her eyes darkened and she said: “You see, Search, why I couldn’t go to the police. Diana who supports me; Calvin; Richard and—Richard’s wife.”
    She meant that no one else could have poisoned her; no one else had been there; no one else had had opportunity. And it was a completely untenable stand to take.
    A feeling almost of claustrophobia caught at Search. She rose abruptly and