"No," she murmured, "nothing new has happened. You told me to call
on you if I should think of anything else."
She said it with an air as if confessing something. It was
apparent that, whatever it was, she had known it all the time and
only after a struggle had brought herself to telling it.
"Then you have thought of something?" prompted Craig.
"Yes," she replied in a low tone. Then with an effort she went on:
"I don't know whether you know it or not, but my family is an old
one, one of the oldest in Peru."
Kennedy nodded encouragingly.
"Back in the old days, after Pizarro," she hurried on, no longer
able to choose her words, but blurting the thing out directly, "an
ancestor of mine was murdered by an Inca dagger."
She stopped again and looked about, actually frightened at her own
temerity, evidently. Kennedy and his twentieth-century
surroundings seemed again to reassure her.
"I can't tell you the story," she resumed. "I don't know it. My
father knew it. But it was some kind of family secret, for he
never told me. Once when I asked him he put me off; told me to
wait until I was a little older."
"And you think that may have something to do with the case?" asked
Kennedy, trying to draw out anything more that she knew.
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