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The Circular Staircase

by Mary Roberts Rinehart · English · Gutenberg #434 · 401,553 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Circular Staircase

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart


        
Release date: February 1, 1996 [eBook #434]
                Most recently updated: August 3, 2025

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/434


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CIRCULAR STAIRCASE ***

[Illustration]




The Circular Staircase

by Mary Roberts Rinehart


Contents

 I. I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE
 II. A LINK CUFF-BUTTON
 III. MR. JOHN BAILEY APPEARS
 IV. WHERE IS HALSEY?
 V. GERTRUDE’S ENGAGEMENT
 VI. IN THE EAST CORRIDOR
 VII. A SPRAINED ANKLE
 VIII. THE OTHER HALF OF THE LINE
 IX. JUST LIKE A GIRL
 X. THE TRADERS’ BANK
 XI. HALSEY MAKES A CAPTURE
 XII. ONE MYSTERY FOR ANOTHER
 XIII. LOUISE
 XIV. AN EGG-NOG AND A TELEGRAM
 XV. LIDDY GIVES THE ALARM
 XVI. IN THE EARLY MORNING
 XVII. A HINT OF SCANDAL
 XVIII.A HOLE IN THE WALL 
 XIX. CONCERNING THOMAS
 XX. DOCTOR WALKER’S WARNING
 XXI. FOURTEEN ELM STREET
 XXII. A LADDER OUT OF PLACE
 XXIII. WHILE THE STABLES BURNED
 XXIV. FLINDERS
 XXV. A VISIT FROM LOUISE
 XXVI. HALSEY’S DISAPPEARANCE
 XXVII. WHO IS NINA CARRINGTON?
 XXVIII. A TRAMP AND THE TOOTHACHE
 XXIX. A SCRAP OF PAPER
 XXX. WHEN CHURCHYARDS YAWN
 XXXI. BETWEEN TWO FIREPLACES
 XXXII. ANNE WATSON’S STORY
 XXXIII. AT THE FOOT OF THE STAIRS
 XXXIV. THE ODDS AND ENDS




CHAPTER I.
I TAKE A COUNTRY HOUSE


This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted
her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer
out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious
crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and
prosperous. For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for
twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the
carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown
linen; for as many summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after
watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet
in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply
does not depend on a tank on the roof.

And then—the madness seized me. When I look back over the months I
spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all. As it is, I show
the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences. I have turned very
gray—Liddy reminded me of it, only yesterday, by saying that a little
bluing in the rinse-water would make my hair silvery, instead of a
yellowish white. I hate to be reminded of unpleasant things and I
snapped her off.

“No,” I said sharply, “I’m not going to use bluing at my time of life,
or starch, either.”

Liddy’s nerves are gone, she says, since that awful summer, but she has
enough left, goodness knows! And when she begins to go around with a
lump in her throat, all I have to do is to threaten to return to
Sunnyside, and she is frightened into a semblance of cheerfulness,—from
which you may judge that the summer there was anything but a success.

The newspaper accounts have been so garbled and incomplete—one of them
mentioned me but once, and then only as the tenant at the time the
thing happened—that I feel it my due to tell what I know. Mr. Jamieson,
the detective, said himself he could never have done without me,
although he gave me little enough credit, in print.

I shall have to go back several years—thirteen, to be exact—to start my
story. At that time my brother died, leaving me his two children.
Halsey was eleven then, and Gertrude was seven. All the
responsibilities of maternity were thrust upon me suddenly; to perfect
the profession of motherhood requires precisely as many years as the
child has lived, like the man who started to carry the calf and ended
by walking along with the bull on his shoulders. However, I did the
best I could. When Gertrude got past the hair-ribbon age, and Halsey
asked for a scarf-pin and put on long trousers—and a wonderful help
that was to the darning!—I sent them away to good schools. After that,
my responsibility was chiefly postal, with three months every summer in
which to replenish their wardrobes, look over their lists of
acquaintances, and generally to take my foster-motherhood out of its
nine months’ retirement in camphor.

I missed the summers with them when, somewhat later, at boarding-school
and college, the children spent much of their vacations with friends.
Gradually I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome
than when signed to a letter, though I wrote them at stated intervals.
But when Halsey had finished his electrical course and Gertrude her
boarding-school, and both came home to stay, things were suddenly
changed. The winter Gertrude came out was nothing but a succession of
sitting up late at night to bring her home from things, taking her to
the dressmakers between naps the next day, and discouraging ineligible
youths with either more money than brains, or more brains than money.
Also, I acquired a great many things: to say _lingerie_ for
under-garments, “frocks” and “gowns” instead of dresses, and that
beardless sophomores are not college boys, but college men. Halsey
required less personal supervision, and as they both got their mother’s
fortune that winter, my responsibility became purely moral. Halsey
bought a car, of course, and I learned how to tie over my bonnet a gray
baize veil, and, after a time, never to stop to look at the dogs one
has run down. People are apt to be so unpleasant about their dogs.

The additions to my education made me a properly equipped maiden aunt,
and by spring I was quite tractable. So when Halsey suggested camping
in the Adirondacks and Gertrude wanted Bar Harbor, we compromised on a
good country house with links near, within motor distance of town and
telephone distance of the doctor. That was how we went to Sunnyside.

We went out to inspect the property, and it seemed to deserve its name.
Its cheerful appearance gave no indication whatever of anything out of
the ordinary. Only one thing seemed unusual to me: the housekeeper, who
had been left in charge, had moved from the house to the gardener’s
lodge, a few days before. As the lodge was far enough away from the
house, it seemed to me that either fire or thieves could complete their
work of destruction undisturbed. The property was an extensive one: the
house on the top of a hill, which sloped away in great stretches of
green lawn and clipped hedges, to the road; and across the valley,
perhaps a couple of miles away, was the Greenwood Club House. Gertrude
and Halsey were infatuated.

“Why, it’s everything you want,” Halsey said “View, air, good water and
good roads. As for the house, it’s big enough for a hospital, if it has
a Queen Anne front and a Mary Anne back,” which was ridiculous: it was
pure Elizabethan.

Of course we took the place; it was not my idea of comfort, being much
too large and sufficiently isolated to make the servant question
serious. But I give myself credit for this: whatever has happened
since, I never blamed Halsey and Gertrude for taking me there. And
another thing: if the series of catastrophes there did nothing else, it
taught me one thing—that somehow, somewhere, from perhaps a
half-civilized ancestor who wore a sheepskin garment and trailed his
food or his prey, I have in me the instinct of the chase. Were I a man
I should be a trapper of criminals, trailing them as relentlessly as no
doubt my sheepskin ancestor did his wild boar. But being an unmarried
woman, with the handicap of my sex, my first acquaintance with crime
will probably be my last. Indeed, it came near enough to being my last
acquaintance with anything.

The property was owned by Paul Armstrong, the president of the Traders’
Bank, who at the time we took the house was in the west with his wife
and daughter, and a Doctor Walker, the Armstrong family physician.
Halsey knew Louise Armstrong,—had been rather attentive to her the
winter before, but as Halsey was always attentive to somebody, I had
not thought of it seriously, although she was a charming girl. I knew
of Mr. Armstrong only through his connection with the bank, where the
children’s money was largely invested, and through an ugly story about
the son, Arnold Armstrong, who was reported to have forged his father’s
name, for a considerable amount, to some bank paper. However, the story
had had no interest for me.

I cleared Halsey and Gertrude away to a house party, and moved out to
Sunnyside the first of May. The roads were bad, but the trees were in
leaf, and there were still tulips in the borders around the house. The
arbutus was fragrant in the woods under the dead leaves, and on the way
from the station, a short mile, while the car stuck in the mud, I found
a bank showered with tiny forget-me-nots. The birds—don’t ask me what
kind; they all look alike to me, unless they have a hall mark of some
bright color—the birds were chirping in the hedges, and everything
breathed of peace. Liddy, who was born and bred on a brick pavement,
got a little bit down-spirited when the crickets began to chirp, or
scrape their legs together, or whatever it is they do, at twilight.

The first night passed quietly enough. I have always been grateful for
that one night’s peace; it shows what the country might be, under
favorable circumstances. Never after that night did I put my head on my
pillow with any assurance how long it would be there; or on my
shoulders, for that matter.

On the following morning Liddy and Mrs. Ralston, my own housekeeper,
had a difference of opinion, and Mrs. Ralston left on the eleven train.
Just after luncheon, Burke, the butler, was taken unexpectedly with a
pain in his right side, much worse when I was within hearing distance,
and by afternoon he was started cityward. That night the cook’s sister
had a baby—the cook, seeing indecision in my face, made it twins on
second thought—and, to be short, by noon the next day the household
staff was down to Liddy and myself. And this in a house with twenty-two
rooms and five baths!

Liddy wanted to go back to the city at once, but the milk-boy said that
Thomas Johnson, the Armstrongs’ colored butler, was working as a waiter
at the Greenwood Club, and might come back. I have the usual scruples
about coercing people’s servants away, but few of us have any
conscience regarding institutions or corporations—witness the way we
beat railroads and street-car companies when we can—so I called up the
club, and about eight o’clock Thomas Johnson came to see me. Poor
Thomas!

Well, it ended by my engaging Thomas on the spot, at outrageous wages,
and with permission to sleep in the gardener’s lodge, empty since the
house was rented. The old man—he was white-haired and a little stooped,
but with an immense idea of his personal dignity—gave me his reasons
hesitatingly.

“I ain’t sayin’ nothin’, Mis’ Innes,” he said, with his hand on the
door-knob, “but there’s been goin’s-on here this las’ few months as
ain’t natchal. ’Tain’t one thing an’ ’tain’t another—it’s jest a door
squealin’ here, an’ a winder closin’ there, but when doors an’ winders
gets to cuttin’ up capers and there’s nobody nigh ’em, it’s time Thomas
Johnson sleeps somewhar’s else.”

Liddy, who seemed to be never more than ten feet away from me that
night, and was afraid of her shadow in that great barn of a place,
screamed a little, and turned a yellow-green. But I am not easily
alarmed.

It was entirely in vain; I represented to Thomas that we were alone,
and that he would have to stay in the house that night. He was politely
firm, but he would come over early the next morning, and if I gave him
a key, he would come in time to get some sort of breakfast. I stood on
the huge veranda and watched him shuffle along down the shadowy drive,
with mingled feelings—irritation at his cowardice and thankfulness at
getting him at all. I am not ashamed to say that I double-locked the
hall door when I went in.

“You can lock up the rest of the house and go to bed, Liddy,” I said
severely. “You give me the creeps standing there. A woman of your age
ought to have better sense.” It usually braces Liddy to mention her
age: she owns to forty—which is absurd. Her mother cooked for my
grandfather, and Liddy must be at least as old as I. But that night she
refused to brace.

“You’re not going to ask me to lock up, Miss Rachel!” she quavered.
“Why, there’s a dozen French windows in the drawing-room and the
billiard-room wing, and every one opens on a porch. And Mary Anne said
that last night there was a man standing by the stable when she locked
the kitchen door.”

“Mary Anne was a fool,” I said sternly. “If there had been a man there,
she would have had him in the kitchen and been feeding him what was
left from dinner, inside of an hour, from force of habit. Now don’t be
ridiculous. Lock up the house and go to bed. I am going to read.”


Illustration:

But Liddy set her lips tight and stood still.

“I’m not going to bed,” she said. “I am going to pack up, and to-morrow
I am going to leave.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort,” I snapped. Liddy and I often desire to
part company, but never at the same time. “If you are afraid, I will go
with you, but for goodness’ sake don’t try to hide behind me.”

The house was a typical summer residence on an extensive scale.
Wherever possible, on the first floor, the architect had done away with
partitions, using arches and columns instead. The effect was cool and
spacious, but scarcely cozy. As Liddy and I went from one window to
another, our voices echoed back at us uncomfortably. There was plenty
of light—the electric plant down in the village supplied us—but there
were long vistas of polished floor, and mirrors which reflected us from
unexpected corners, until I felt some of Liddy’s foolishness
communicate itself to me.

The house was very long, a rectangle in general form, with the main
entrance in the center of the long side. The brick-paved entry opened
into a short hall to the right of which, separated only by a row of
pillars, was a huge living-room. Beyond that was the drawing-room, and
in the end, the billiard-room. Off the billiard-room, in the extreme
right wing, was a den, or card-room, with a small hall opening on the
east veranda, and from there went up a narrow circular staircase.
Halsey had pointed it out with delight.

“Just look, Aunt Rachel,” he said with a flourish. “The architect that
put up this joint was wise to a few things. Arnold Armstrong and his
friends could sit here and play cards all night and stumble up to bed
in the early morning, without having the family send in a police call.”

Liddy and I got as far as the card-room and turned on all the lights. I
tried the small entry door there, which opened on the veranda, and
examined the windows. Everything was secure, and Liddy, a little less
nervous now, had just pointed out to me the disgracefully dusty
condition of the hard-wood floor, when suddenly the lights went out. We
waited a moment; I think Liddy was stunned with fright, or she would
have screamed. And then I clutched her by the arm and pointed to one of
the windows opening on the porch. The sudden change threw the window
into relief, an oblong of grayish light, and showed us a figure
standing close, peering in. As I looked it darted across the veranda
and out of sight in the darkness.




CHAPTER II.
A LINK CUFF-BUTTON


Liddy’s knees seemed to give away under her. Without a sound she sank
down, leaving me staring at the window in petrified amazement. Liddy
began to moan under her breath, and in my excitement I reached down and
shook her.

“Stop it,” I whispered. “It’s only a woman—maybe a maid of the
Armstrongs’. Get up and help me find the door.” She groaned again.
“Very well,” I said, “then I’ll have to leave you here. I’m going.”

She moved at that, and, holding to my sleeve, we felt our way, with
numerous collisions, to the billiard-room, and from there to the
drawing-room. The lights came on then, and, with the long French
windows unshuttered, I had a creepy feeling that each one sheltered a
peering face. In fact, in the light of what happened afterward, I am
pretty certain we were under surveillance during the entire ghostly
evening. We hurried over the rest of the locking-up and got upstairs as
quickly as we could. I left the lights all on, and our footsteps echoed
cavernously. Liddy had a stiff neck the next morning, from looking back
over her shoulder, and she refused to go to bed.

“Let me stay in your dressing-room, Miss Rachel,” she begged. “If you
don’t, I’ll sit in the hall outside the door. I’m not going to be
murdered with my eyes shut.”

“If you’re going to be murdered,” I retorted, “it won’t make any
difference whether they are shut or open. But you may stay in the
dressing-room, if you will lie on the couch: when you sleep in a chair
you snore.”

She was too far gone to be indignant, but after a while she came to the
door and looked in to where I was composing myself for sleep with
Drummond’s _Spiritual Life_.

“That wasn’t a woman, Miss Rachel,” she said, with her shoes in her
hand. “It was a man in a long coat.”

“What woman was a man?” I discouraged her without looking up, and she
went back to the couch.

It was eleven o’clock when I finally prepared for bed. In spite of my
assumption of indifference, I locked the door into the hall, and
finding the transom did not catch, I put a chair cautiously before the
door—it was not necessary to rouse Liddy—and climbing up put on the
ledge of the transom a small dressing-mirror, so that any movement of
the frame would send it crashing down. Then, secure in my precautions,
I went to bed.

I did not go to sleep at once. Liddy disturbed me just as I was growing
drowsy, by coming in and peering under the bed. She was afraid to
speak, however, because of her previous snubbing, and went back,
stopping in the doorway to sigh dismally.

Somewhere down-stairs a clock with a chime sang away the
hours—eleven-thirty, forty-five, twelve. And then the lights went out
to stay. The Casanova Electric Company shuts up shop and goes home to
bed at midnight: when one has a party, I believe it is customary to fee
the company, which will drink hot coffee and keep awake a couple of
hours longer. But the lights were gone for good that night. Liddy had
gone to sleep, as I knew she would. She was a very unreliable person:
always awake and ready to talk when she wasn’t wanted and dozing off to
sleep when she was. I called her once or twice, the only result being
an explosive snore that threatened her very windpipe—then I got up and
lighted a bedroom candle.

My bedroom and dressing room were above the big living-room on the
first floor. On the second floor a long corridor ran the length of the
house, with rooms opening from both sides. In the wings were small
corridors crossing the main one—the plan was simplicity itself. And
just as I got back into bed, I heard a sound from the east wing,
apparently, that made me stop, frozen, with one bedroom slipper half
off, and listen. It was a rattling metallic sound, and it reverberated
along the empty halls like the crash of doom. It was for all the world
as if something heavy, perhaps a piece of steel, had rolled clattering
and jangling down the hard-wood stairs leading to the card-room.

In the silence that followed Liddy stirred and snored again. I was
exasperated: first she kept me awake by silly alarms, then when she was
needed she slept like Joe Jefferson, or Rip,—they are always the same
to me. I went in and aroused her, and I give her credit for being wide
awake the minute I spoke.

“Get up,” I said, “if you don’t want to be murdered in your bed.”

“Where? How?” she yelled vociferously, and jumped up.

“There’s somebody in the house,” I said. “Get up. We’ll have to get to
the telephone.”

“Not out in the hall!” she gasped; “Oh, Miss Rachel, not out in the
hall!” trying to hold me back. But I am a large woman and Liddy is
small. We got to the door, somehow, and Liddy held a brass andiron,
which it was all she could do to lift, let alone brain anybody with. I
listened, and, hearing nothing, opened the door a little and peered
into the hall. It was a black void, full of terrible suggestion, and my
candle only emphasized the gloom. Liddy squealed and drew me back
again, and as the door slammed, the mirror I had put on the transom
came down and hit her on the head. That completed our demoralization.
It was some time before I could persuade her she had not been attacked
from behind by a burglar, and when she found the mirror smashed on the
floor she wasn’t much better.

“There’s going to be a death!” she wailed. “Oh, Miss Rachel, there’s
going to be a death!”

“There will be,” I said grimly, “if you don’t keep quiet, Liddy Allen.”

And so we sat there until morning, wondering if the candle would last
until dawn, and arranging what trains we could take back to town. If we
had only stuck to that decision and gone back before it was too late!

The sun came finally, and from my window I watched the trees along the
drive take shadowy form, gradually lose their ghostlike appearance,
become gray and then green. The Greenwood Club showed itself a dab of
white against the hill across the valley, and an early robin or two
hopped around in the dew. Not until the milk-boy and the sun came,
about the same time, did I dare to open the door into the hall and look
around. Everything was as we had left it. Trunks were heaped here and
there, ready for the trunk-room, and through an end window of stained
glass came a streak of red and yellow daylight that was eminently
cheerful. The milk-boy was pounding somewhere below, and the day had
begun.

Thomas Johnson came ambling up the drive about half-past six, and we
could hear him clattering around on the lower floor, opening shutters.
I had to take Liddy to her room up-stairs, however,—she was quite sure
she would find something uncanny. In fact, when she did not, having now
the courage of daylight, she was actually disappointed.

Well, we did not go back to town that day.

The discovery of a small picture fallen from the wall of the
drawing-room was quite sufficient to satisfy Liddy that the alarm had
been a false one, but I was anything but convinced. Allowing for my
nerves and the fact that small noises magnify themselves at night,
there was still no possibility that the picture had made the series of
sounds I heard. To prove it, however, I dropped it again. It fell with
a single muffled crash of its wooden frame, and incidentally ruined
itself beyond repair. I justified myself by reflecting that if the
Armstrongs chose to leave pictures in unsafe positions, and to rent a
house with a family ghost, the destruction of property was their
responsibility, not mine.

I warned Liddy not to mention what had happened to anybody, and
telephoned to town for servants. Then after a breakfast which did more
credit to Thomas’ heart than his head, I went on a short tour of
investigation. The sounds had come from the east wing, and not without
some qualms I began there. At first I found nothing. Since then I have
developed my powers of observation, but at that time I was a novice.
The small card-room seemed undisturbed. I looked for footprints, which
is, I believe, the conventional thing to do, although my experience has
been that as clues both footprints and thumb-marks are more useful in
fiction than in fact. But the stairs in that wing offered something.

At the top of the flight had been placed a tall wicker hamper, packed,
with linen that had come from town. It stood at the edge of the top
step, almost barring passage, and on the step below it was a long fresh
scratch. For three steps the scratch was repeated, gradually
diminishing, as if some object had fallen, striking each one. Then for
four steps nothing. On the fifth step below was a round dent in the
hard wood. That was all, and it seemed little enough, except that I was
positive the marks had not been there the day before.

It bore out my theory of the sound, which had been for all the world
like the bumping of a metallic object down a flight of steps. The four
steps had been skipped. I reasoned that an iron bar, for instance,
would do something of the sort,—strike two or three steps, end down,
then turn over, jumping a few stairs, and landing with a thud.

Iron bars, however, do not fall down-stairs in the middle of the night
alone. Coupled with the figure on the veranda the agency by which it
climbed might be assumed. But—and here was the thing that puzzled me
most—the doors were all fastened that morning, the windows unmolested,
and the particular door from the card-room to the veranda had a
combination lock of which I held the key, and which had not been
tampered with.

I fixed on an attempt at burglary, as the most natural explanation—an
attempt frustrated by the falling of the object, whatever it was, that
had roused me. Two things I could not understand: how the intruder had
escaped with everything locked, and why he had left the small silver,
which, in the absence of a butler, had remained down-stairs over night.

Under pretext of learning more about the place, Thomas Johnson led me
through the house and the cellars, without result. Everything was in
good order and repair; money had been spent lavishly on construction
and plumbing. The house was full of conveniences, and I had no reason
to repent my bargain, save the fact that, in the nature of things,
night must come again. And other nights must follow—and we were a long
way from a police-station.

In the afternoon a hack came up from Casanova, with a fresh relay of
servants. The driver took them with a flourish to the servants’
entrance, and drove around to the front of the house, where I was
awaiting him.

“Two dollars,” he said in reply to my question. “I don’t charge full
rates, because, bringin’ ’em up all summer as I do, it pays to make a
special price. When they got off the train, I sez, sez I, ‘There’s
another bunch for Sunnyside, cook, parlor maid and all.’ Yes’m—six
summers, and a new lot never less than once a month. They won’t stand
for the country and the lonesomeness, I reckon.”

But with the presence of the “bunch” of servants my courage revived,
and late in the afternoon came a message from Gertrude that she and
Halsey would arrive that night at about eleven o’clock, coming in the
car from Richfield. Things were looking up; and when Beulah, my cat, a
most intelligent animal, found some early catnip on a bank near the
house and rolled in it in a feline ecstasy, I decided that getting back
to nature was the thing to do.

While I was dressing for dinner, Liddy rapped at the door. She was
hardly herself yet, but privately I think she was worrying about the
broken mirror and its augury, more than anything else. When she came in
she was holding something in her hand, and she laid it on the
dressing-table carefully.

“I found it in the linen hamper,” she said. “It must be Mr. Halsey’s,
but it seems queer how it got there.”

It was the half of a link cuff-button of unique design, and I looked at
it carefully.

“Where was it? In the bottom of the hamper?” I asked.

“On the very top,” she replied. “It’s a mercy it didn’t fall out on the
way.”

When Liddy had gone I examined the fragment attentively. I had never
seen it before, and I was certain it was not Halsey’s. It was of
Italian workmanship, and consisted of a mother-of-pearl foundation,
encrusted with tiny seed-pearls, strung on horsehair to hold them. In
the center was a small ruby. The trinket was odd enough, but not
intrinsically of great value. Its interest for me lay in this: Liddy
had found it lying in the top of the hamper which had blocked the
east-wing stairs.

That afternoon the Armstrongs’ housekeeper, a youngish good-looking
woman, applied for Mrs. Ralston’s place, and I was glad enough to take
her. She looked as though she might be equal to a dozen of Liddy, with
her snapping black eyes and heavy jaw. Her name was Anne Watson, and I
dined that evening for the first time in three days.




CHAPTER III.
MR. JOHN BAILEY APPEARS


I had dinner served in the breakfast-room. Somehow the huge dining-room
depressed me, and Thomas, cheerful enough all day, allowed his spirits
to go down with the sun. He had a habit of watching the corners of the
room, left shadowy by the candles on the table, and altogether it was
not a festive meal.

Dinner over I went into the living-room. I had three hours before the
children could possibly arrive, and I got out my knitting. I had
brought along two dozen pairs of slipper soles in assorted sizes—I
always send knitted slippers to the Old Ladies’ Home at Christmas—and
now I sorted over the wools with a grim determination not to think
about the night before. But my mind was not on my work: at the end of a
half-hour I found I had put a row of blue scallops on Eliza
Klinefelter’s lavender slippers, and I put them away.

I got out the cuff-link and went with it to the pantry. Thomas was
wiping silver and the air was heavy with tobacco smoke. I sniffed and
looked around, but there was no pipe to be seen.

“Thomas,” I said, “you have been smoking.”

“No, ma’m.” He was injured innocence itself. “It’s on my coat, ma’m.
Over at the club the gentlemen—”

But Thomas did not finish. The pantry was suddenly filled with the odor
of singeing cloth. Thomas gave a clutch at his coat, whirled to the
sink, filled a tumbler with water and poured it into his right pocket
with the celerity of practice.

“Thomas,” I said, when he was sheepishly mopping the floor, “smoking is
a filthy and injurious habit. If you must smoke, you must; but don’t
stick a lighted pipe in your pocket again. Your skin’s your own: you
can blister it if you like. But this house is not mine, and I don’t
want a conflagration. Did you ever see this cuff-link before?”

No, he never had, he said, but he looked at it oddly.

“I picked it up in the hall,” I added indifferently. The old man’s eyes
were shrewd under his bushy eyebrows.

“There’s strange goin’s-on here, Mis’ Innes,” he said, shaking his
head. “Somethin’s goin’ to happen, sure. You ain’t took notice that the
big clock in the hall is stopped, I reckon?”

“Nonsense,” I said. “Clocks have to stop, don’t they, if they’re not
wound?”

“It’s wound up, all right, and it stopped at three o’clock last night,”
he answered solemnly. “More’n that, that there clock ain’t stopped for
fifteen years, not since Mr. Armstrong’s first wife died. And that
ain’t all,—no _ma’m_. Last three nights I slep’ in this place, after
the electrics went out I had a token. My oil lamp was full of oil, but
it kep’ goin’ out, do what I would. Minute I shet my eyes, out that
lamp’d go. There ain’t no surer token of death. The Bible sez, _Let yer
light shine!_ When a hand you can’t see puts yer light out, it means
death, sure.”

The old man’s voice was full of conviction. In spite of myself I had a
chilly sensation in the small of my back, and I left him mumbling over
his dishes. Later on I heard a crash from the pantry, and Liddy
reported that Beulah, who is coal black, had darted in front of Thomas
just as he picked up a tray of dishes; that the bad omen had been too
much for him, and he had dropped the tray.

The chug of the automobile as it climbed the hill was the most welcome
sound I had heard for a long time, and with Gertrude and Halsey
actually before me, my troubles seemed over for good. Gertrude stood
smiling in the hall, with her hat quite over one ear, and her hair in
every direction under her pink veil. Gertrude is a very pretty girl, no
matter how her hat is, and I was not surprised when Halsey presented a
good-looking young man, who bowed at me and looked at Trude—that is the
ridiculous nickname Gertrude brought from school.

“I have brought a guest, Aunt Ray,” Halsey said. “I want you to adopt
him into your affections and your Saturday-to-Monday list. Let me
present John Bailey, only you must call him Jack. In twelve hours he’ll
be calling you ‘Aunt’: I know him.”

We shook hands, and I got a chance to look at Mr. Bailey; he was a tall
fellow, perhaps thirty, and he wore a small mustache. I remember
wondering why: he seemed to have a good mouth and when he smiled his
teeth were above the average. One never knows why certain men cling to
a messy upper lip that must get into things, any more than one
understands some women building up their hair on wire atrocities.
Otherwise, he was very good to look at, stalwart and tanned, with the
direct gaze that I like. I am particular about Mr. Bailey, because he
was a prominent figure in what happened later.

Gertrude was tired with the trip and went up to bed very soon. I made
up my mind to tell them nothing until the next day, and then to make
as light of our excitement as possible. After all, what had I to tell?
An inquisitive face peering in at a window; a crash in the night; a
scratch or two on the stairs, and half a cuff-button! As for Thomas and
his forebodings, it was always my belief that a negro is one part
thief, one part pigment, and the rest superstition.

It was Saturday night. The two men went to the billiard-room, and I
could hear them talking as I went up-stairs. It seemed that Halsey had
stopped at the Greenwood Club for gasolene and found Jack Bailey there,
with the Sunday golf crowd. Mr. Bailey had not been hard to
persuade—probably Gertrude knew why—and they had carried him off
triumphantly. I roused Liddy to get them something to eat—Thomas was
beyond reach in the lodge—and paid no attention to her evident terror
of the kitchen regions. Then I went to bed. The men were still in the
billiard-room when I finally dozed off, and the last thing I remember
was the howl of a dog in front of the house. It wailed a crescendo of
woe that trailed off hopefully, only to break out afresh from a new
point of the compass.

At three o’clock in the morning I was roused by a revolver shot. The
sound seemed to come from just outside my door. For a moment I could
not move. Then—I heard Gertrude stirring in her room, and the next
moment she had thrown open the connecting door.

“O Aunt Ray! Aunt Ray!” she cried hysterically. “Some one has been
killed, killed!”

“Thieves,” I said shortly. “Thank goodness, there are some men in the
house to-night.” I was getting into my slippers and a bath-robe, and
Gertrude with shaking hands was lighting a lamp. Then we opened the
door into the hall, where, crowded on the upper landing of the stairs,
the maids, white-faced and trembling, were peering down, headed by
Liddy. I was greeted by a series of low screams and questions, and I
tried to quiet them.

Gertrude had dropped on a chair and sat there limp and shivering.

I went at once across the hall to Halsey’s room and knocked; then I
pushed the door open. It was empty; the bed had not been occupied!

“He must be in Mr. Bailey’s room,” I said excitedly, and followed by
Liddy, we went there. Like Halsey’s, it had not been occupied! Gertrude
was on her feet now, but she leaned against the door for support.

“They have been killed!” she gasped. Then she caught me by the arm and
dragged me toward the stairs. “They may only be hurt, and we must find
them,” she said, her eyes dilated with excitement.

I don’t remember how we got down the stairs: I do remember expecting
every moment to be killed. The cook was at the telephone up-stairs,
calling the Greenwood Club, and Liddy was behind me, afraid to come and
not daring to stay behind. We found the living-room and the
drawing-room undisturbed. Somehow I felt that whatever we found would
be in the card-room or on the staircase, and nothing but the fear that
Halsey was in danger drove me on; with every step my knees seemed to
give way under me. Gertrude was ahead and in the card-room she stopped,
holding her candle high. Then she pointed silently to the doorway into
the hall beyond. Huddled there on the floor, face down, with his arms
extended, was a man.

Gertrude ran forward with a gasping sob. “Jack,” she cried, “oh, Jack!”

Liddy had run, screaming, and the two of us were there alone. It was
Gertrude who turned him over, finally, until we could see his white
face, and then she drew a deep breath and dropped limply to her knees.
It was the body of a man, a gentleman, in a dinner coat and white
waistcoat, stained now with blood—the body of a man I had never seen
before.




CHAPTER IV.
WHERE IS HALSEY?


Gertrude gazed at the face in a kind of fascination. Then she put out
her hands blindly, and I thought she was going to faint.

“He has killed him!” she muttered almost inarticulately; and at that,
because my nerves were going, I gave her a good shake.

“What do you mean?” I said frantically. There was a depth of grief and
conviction in her tone that was worse than anything she could have
said. The shake braced her, anyhow, and she seemed to pull herself
together. But not another word would she say: she stood gazing down at
that gruesome figure on the floor, while Liddy, ashamed of her flight
and afraid to come back alone, drove before her three terrified
women-servants into the drawing-room, which was as near as any of them
would venture.

Once in the drawing-room, Gertrude collapsed and went from one fainting
spell into another. I had all I could do to keep Liddy from drowning
her with cold water, and the maids huddled in a corner, as much use as
so many sheep. In a short time, although it seemed hours, a car came
rushing up, and Anne Watson, who had waited to dress, opened the door.
Three men from the Greenwood Club, in all kinds of costumes, hurried
in. I recognized a Mr. Jarvis, but the others were strangers.

“What’s wrong?” the Jarvis man asked—and we made a strange picture, no
doubt. “Nobody hurt, is there?” He was looking at Gertrude.

“Worse than that, Mr. Jarvis,” I said. “I think it is murder.”

At the word there was a commotion. The cook began to cry, and Mrs.
Watson knocked over a chair. The men were visibly impressed.

“Not any member of the family?” Mr. Jarvis asked, when he had got his
breath.

“No,” I said; and motioning Liddy to look after Gertrude, I led the way
with a lamp to the card-room door. One of the men gave an exclamation,
and they all hurried across the room. Mr. Jarvis took the lamp from
me—I remember that—and then, feeling myself getting dizzy and
light-headed, I closed my eyes. When I opened them their brief
examination was over, and Mr. Jarvis was trying to put me in a chair.

“You must get up-stairs,” he said firmly, “you and Miss Gertrude, too.
This has been a terrible shock. In his own home, too.”

I stared at him without comprehension. “Who is it?” I asked with
difficulty. There was a band drawn tight around my throat.

“It is Arnold Armstrong,” he said, looking at me oddly, “and he has
been murdered in his father’s house.”

After a minute I gathered myself together and Mr. Jarvis helped me into
the living-room. Liddy had got Gertrude up-stairs, and the two strange
men from the club stayed with the body. The reaction from the shock and
strain was tremendous: I was collapsed—and then Mr. Jarvis asked me a
question that brought back my wandering faculties.

“Where is Halsey?” he asked.

“Halsey!” Suddenly Gertrude’s stricken face rose before me the empty
rooms up-stairs. Where was Halsey?

“He was here, wasn’t he?” Mr. Jarvis persisted. “He stopped at the club
on his way over.”

“I—don’t know where he is,” I said feebly.

One of the men from the club came in, asked for the telephone, and I
could hear him excitedly talking, saying something about coroners and
detectives. Mr. Jarvis leaned over to me.

“Why don’t you trust me, Miss Innes?” he said. “If I can do anything I
will. But tell me the whole thing.”

I did, finally, from the beginning, and when I told of Jack Bailey’s
being in the house that night, he gave a long whistle.

“I wish they were both here,” he said when I finished. “Whatever mad
prank took them away, it would look better if they were here.
Especially—”

“Especially what?”

“Especially since Jack Bailey and Arnold Armstrong were notoriously bad
friends. It was Bailey who got Arnold into trouble last
spring—something about the bank. And then, too—”

“Go on,” I said. “If there is anything more, I ought to know.”

“There’s nothing more,” he said evasively. “There’s just one thing we
may bank on, Miss Innes. Any court in the country will acquit a man who
kills an intruder in his house, at night. If Halsey—”

“Why, you don’t think Halsey did it!” I exclaimed. There was a queer
feeling of physical nausea coming over me.

“No, no, not at all,” he said with forced cheerfulness. “Come, Miss
Innes, you’re a ghost of yourself and I am going to help you up-stairs
and call your maid. This has been too much for you.”

Liddy helped me back to bed, and under the impression that I was in
danger of freezing to death, put a hot-water bottle over my heart and
another at my feet. Then she left me. It was early dawn now, and from
voices under my window I surmised that Mr. Jarvis and his companions
were searching the grounds. As for me, I lay in bed, with every faculty
awake. Where had Halsey gone? How had he gone, and when? Before the
murder, no doubt, but who would believe that? If either he or Jack
Bailey had heard an intruder in the house and shot him—as they might
have been justified in doing—why had they run away? The whole thing was
unheard of, outrageous, and—impossible to ignore.

About six o’clock Gertrude came in. She was fully dressed, and I sat up
nervously.

“Poor Aunty!” she said. “What a shocking night you have had!” She came
over and sat down on the bed, and I saw she looked very tired and worn.

“Is there anything new?” I asked anxiously.

“Nothing. The car is gone, but Warner”—he is the chauffeur—“Warner is
at the lodge and knows nothing about it.”

“Well,” I said, “if I ever get my hands on Halsey Innes, I shall not
let go until I have told him a few things. When we get this cleared up,
I am going back to the city to be quiet. One more night like the last
two will end me. The peace of the country—fiddle sticks!”

Whereupon I told Gertrude of the noises the night before, and the
figure on the veranda in the east wing. As an afterthought I brought
out the pearl cuff-link.

“I have no doubt now,” I said, “that it was Arnold Armstrong the night
before last, too. He had a key, no doubt, but why he should steal into
his father’s house I can not imagine. He could have come with my
permission, easily enough. Anyhow, whoever it was that night, left this
little souvenir.”

Gertrude took one look at the cuff-link, and went as white as the
pearls in it; she clutched at the foot of the bed, and stood staring.
As for me, I was quite as astonished as she was.

“Where did—you—find it?” she asked finally, with a desperate effort at
calm. And while I told her she stood looking out of the window with a
look I could not fathom on her face. It was a relief when Mrs. Watson
tapped at the door and brought me some tea and toast. The cook was in
bed, completely demoralized, she reported, and Liddy, brave with the
daylight, was looking for footprints around the house. Mrs. Watson
herself was a wreck; she was blue-white around the lips, and she had
one hand tied up.

She said she had fallen down-stairs in her excitement. It was natural,
of course, that the thing would shock her, having been the Armstrongs’
housekeeper for several years, and knowing Mr. Arnold well.

Gertrude had slipped out during my talk with Mrs. Watson, and I dressed
and went down-stairs. The billiard and card-rooms were locked until the
coroner and the detectives got there, and the men from the club had
gone back for more conventional clothing.

I could hear Thomas in the pantry, alternately wailing for Mr. Arnold,
as he called him, and citing the tokens that had precursed the murder.
The house seemed to choke me, and, slipping a shawl around me, I went
out on the drive. At the corner by the east wing I met Liddy. Her
skirts were draggled with dew to her knees, and her hair was still in
crimps.

“Go right in and change your clothes,” I said sharply. “You’re a sight,
and at your age!”

She had a golf-stick in her hand, and she said she had found it on the
lawn. There was nothing unusual about it, but it occurred to me that a
golf-stick with a metal end might have been the object that had
scratched the stairs near the card-room. I took it from her, and sent
her up for dry garments. Her daylight courage and self-importance, and
her shuddering delight in the mystery, irritated me beyond words. After
I left her I made a circuit of the building. Nothing seemed to be
disturbed: the house looked as calm and peaceful in the morning sun as
it had the day I had been coerced into taking it. There was nothing to
show that inside had been mystery and violence and sudden death.

In one of the tulip beds back of the house an early blackbird was
pecking viciously at something that glittered in the light. I picked my
way gingerly over through the dew and stooped down: almost buried in
the soft ground was a revolver! I scraped the earth off it with the tip
of my shoe, and, picking it up, slipped it into my pocket. Not until I
had got into my bedroom and double-locked the door did I venture to
take it out and examine it. One look was all I needed. It was Halsey’s
revolver. I had unpacked it the day before and put it on his
shaving-stand, and there could be no mistake. His name was on a small
silver plate on the handle.

I seemed to see a network closing around my boy, innocent as I knew he
was. The revolver—I am afraid of them, but anxiety gave me courage to
look through the barrel—the revolver had still two bullets in it. I
could only breathe a prayer of thankfulness that I had found the
revolver before any sharp-eyed detective had come around.

I decided to keep what clues I had, the cuff-link, the golf-stick and
the revolver, in a secure place until I could see some reason for
displaying them. The cuff-link had been dropped into a little filigree
box on my toilet table. I opened the box and felt around for it. The
box was empty—the cuff-link had disappeared!




CHAPTER V.
GERTRUDE’S ENGAGEMENT


At ten o’clock the Casanova hack brought up three men. They introduced
themselves as the coroner of the county and two detectives from the
city. The coroner led the way at once to the locked wing, and with the
aid of one of the detectives examined the rooms and the body. The other
detective, after a short scrutiny of the dead man, busied himself with
the outside of the house. It was only after they had got a fair idea of
things as they were that they sent for me.

I received them in the living-room, and I had made up my mind exactly
what to tell. I had taken the house for the summer, I said, while the
Armstrongs were in California. In spite of a rumor among the servants
about strange noises—I cited Thomas—nothing had occurred the first two
nights. On the third night I believed that some one had been in the
house: I had heard a crashing sound, but being alone with one maid had
not investigated. The house had been locked in the morning and
apparently undisturbed.

Then, as clearly as I could, I related how, the night before, a shot
had roused us; that my niece and I had investigated and found a body;
that I did not know who the murdered man was until Mr. Jarvis from the
club informed me, and that I knew of no reason why Mr. Arnold Armstrong
should steal into his father’s house at night. I should have been glad
to allow him entree there at any time.

“Have you reason to believe, Miss Innes,” the coroner asked, “that any
member of your household, imagining Mr. Armstrong was a burglar, shot
him in self-defense?”

“I have no reason for thinking so,” I said quietly.

“Your theory is that Mr. Armstrong was followed here by some enemy, and
shot as he entered the house?”

“I don’t think I have a theory,” I said. “The thing that has puzzled me
is why Mr. Armstrong should enter his father’s house two nights in
succession, stealing in like a thief, when he needed only to ask
entrance to be admitted.”

The coroner was a very silent man: he took some notes after this, but
he seemed anxious to make the next train back to town. He set the
inquest for the following Saturday, gave Mr. Jamieson, the younger of
the two detectives, and the more intelligent looking, a few
instructions, and, after gravely shaking hands with me and regretting
the unfortunate affair, took his departure, accompanied by the other
detective.

I was just beginning to breathe freely when Mr. Jamieson, who had been
standing by the window, came over to me.

“The family consists of yourself alone, Miss Innes?”

“My niece is here,” I said.

“There is no one but yourself and your niece?”

“My nephew.” I had to moisten my lips.

“Oh, a nephew. I should like to see him, if he is here.”

“He is not here just now,” I said as quietly as I could. “I expect
him—at any time.”

“He was here yesterday evening, I believe?”

“No—yes.”

“Didn’t he have a guest with him? Another man?”

“He brought a friend with him to stay over Sunday, Mr. Bailey.”

“Mr. John Bailey, the cashier of the Traders’ Bank I believe.” And I
knew that some one at the Greenwood Club had told. “When did they
leave?”

“Very early—I don’t know at just what time.”

Mr. Jamieson turned suddenly and looked at me.

“Please try to be more explicit,” he said. “You say your nephew and Mr.
Bailey were in the house last night, and yet you and your niece, with
some women-servants, found the body. Where was your nephew?”

I was entirely desperate by that time.

“I do not know,” I cried, “but be sure of this: Halsey knows nothing of
this thing, and no amount of circumstantial evidence can make an
innocent man guilty.”

“Sit down,” he said, pushing forward a chair. “There are some things I
have to tell you, and, in return, please tell me all you know. Believe
me, things always come out. In the first place, Mr. Armstrong was shot
from above. The bullet was fired at close range, entered below the
shoulder and came out, after passing through the heart, well down the
back. In other words, I believe the murderer stood on the stairs and
fired down. In the second place, I found on the edge of the
billiard-table a charred cigar which had burned itself partly out, and
a cigarette which had consumed itself to the cork tip. Neither one had
been more than lighted, then put down and forgotten. Have you any idea
what it was that made your nephew and Mr. Bailey leave their cigars and
their game, take out the automobile without calling the chauffeur, and
all this at—let me see—certainly before three o’clock in the morning?”

“I don’t know,” I said; “but depend on it, Mr. Jamieson, Halsey will be
back himself to explain everything.”

“I sincerely hope so,” he said. “Miss Innes, has it occurred to you
that Mr. Bailey might know something of this?”

Gertrude had come down-stairs and just as he spoke she came in. I saw
her stop suddenly, as if she had been struck.

“He does not,” she said in a tone that was not her own. “Mr. Bailey and
my brother know nothing of this. The murder was committed at three.
They left the house at a quarter before three.”

“How do you know that?” Mr. Jamieson asked oddly. “Do you _know_ at
what time they left?”

“I do,” Gertrude answered firmly. “At a quarter before three my brother
and Mr. Bailey left the house, by the main entrance. I—was—there.”

“Gertrude,” I said excitedly, “you are dreaming! Why, at a quarter to
three—”

“Listen,” she said. “At half-past two the downstairs telephone rang. I
had not gone to sleep, and I heard it. Then I heard Halsey answer it,
and in a few minutes he came up-stairs and knocked at my door. We—we
talked for a minute, then I put on my dressing-gown and slippers, and
went down-stairs with him. Mr. Bailey was in the billiard-room. We—we
all talked together for perhaps ten minutes. Then it was decided
that—that they should both go away—”

“Can’t you be more explicit?” Mr. Jamieson asked. “_Why_ did they go
away?”

“I am only telling you what happened, not why it happened,” she said
evenly. “Halsey went for the car, and instead of bringing it to the
house and rousing people, he went by the lower road from the stable.
Mr. Bailey was to meet him at the foot of the lawn. Mr. Bailey left—”

“Which way?” Mr. Jamieson asked sharply.

“By the main entrance. He left—it was a quarter to three. I know
exactly.”

“The clock in the hall is stopped, Miss Innes,” said Jamieson. Nothing
seemed to escape him.

“He looked at his watch,” she replied, and I could see Mr. Jamieson’s
snap, as if he had made a discovery. As for myself, during the whole
recital I had been plunged into the deepest amazement.

“Will you pardon me for a personal question?” The detective was a
youngish man, and I thought he was somewhat embarrassed. “What are
your—your relations with Mr. Bailey?”

Gertrude hesitated. Then she came over and put her hand lovingly in
mine.

“I am engaged to marry him,” she said simply.

I had grown so accustomed to surprises that I could only gasp again,
and as for Gertrude, the hand that lay in mine was burning with fever.

“And—after that,” Mr. Jamieson went on, “you went directly to bed?”

Gertrude hesitated.

“No,” she said finally. “I—I am not nervous, and after I had
extinguished the light, I remembered something I had left in the
billiard-room, and I felt my way back there through the darkness.”

“Will you tell me what it was you had forgotten?”

“I can not tell you,” she said slowly. “I—I did not leave the
billiard-room at once—”

“Why?” The detective’s tone was imperative. “This is very important,
Miss Innes.”

“I was crying,” Gertrude said in a low tone. “When the French clock in
the drawing-room struck three, I got up, and then—I heard a step on the
east porch, just outside the card-room. Some one with a key was working
with the latch, and I thought, of course, of Halsey. When we took the
house he called that his entrance, and he had carried a key for it ever
since. The door opened and I was about to ask what he had forgotten,
when there was a flash and a report. Some heavy body dropped, and, half
crazed with terror and shock, I ran through the drawing-room and got
up-stairs—I scarcely remember how.”

She dropped into a chair, and I thought Mr. Jamieson must have
finished. But he was not through.

“You certainly clear your brother and Mr. Bailey admirably,” he said.
“The testimony is invaluable, especially in view of the fact that your
brother and Mr. Armstrong had, I believe, quarreled rather seriously
some time ago.”

“Nonsense,” I broke in. “Things are bad enough, Mr. Jamieson, without
inventing bad feeling where it doesn’t exist. Gertrude, I don’t think
Halsey knew the—the murdered man, did he?”

But Mr. Jamieson was sure of his ground.

“The quarrel, I believe,” he persisted, “was about Mr. Armstrong’s
conduct to you, Miss Gertrude. He had been paying you unwelcome
attentions.”

And I had never seen the man!

When she nodded a “yes” I saw the tremendous possibilities involved. If
this detective could prove that Gertrude feared and disliked the
murdered man, and that Mr. Armstrong had been annoying and possibly
pursuing her with hateful attentions, all that, added to Gertrude’s
confession of her presence in the billiard-room at the time of the
crime, looked strange, to say the least. The prominence of the family
assured a strenuous effort to find the murderer, and if we had nothing
worse to look forward to, we were sure of a distasteful publicity.

Mr. Jamieson shut his note-book with a snap, and thanked us.

“I have an idea,” he said, apropos of nothing at all, “that at any rate
the ghost is laid here. Whatever the rappings have been—and the colored
man says they began when the family went west three months ago—they are
likely to stop now.”

Which shows how much he knew about it. The ghost was not laid: with the
murder of Arnold Armstrong he, or it, only seemed to take on fresh
vigor.

Mr. Jamieson left then, and when Gertrude had gone up-stairs, as she
did at once, I sat and thought over what I had just heard. Her
engagement, once so engrossing a matter, paled now beside the
significance of her story. If Halsey and Jack Bailey had left before
the crime, how came Halsey’s revolver in the tulip bed? What was the
mysterious cause of their sudden flight? What had Gertrude left in the
billiard-room? What was the significance of the cuff-link, and where
was it?




CHAPTER VI.
IN THE EAST CORRIDOR


When the detective left he enjoined absolute secrecy on everybody in
the household. The Greenwood Club promised the same thing, and as there
are no Sunday afternoon papers, the murder was not publicly known until
Monday. The coroner himself notified the Armstrong family lawyer, and
early in the afternoon he came out. I had not seen Mr. Jamieson since
morning, but I knew he had been interrogating the servants. Gertrude
was locked in her room with a headache, and I had luncheon alone.

Mr. Harton, the lawyer, was a little, thin man, and he looked as if he
did not relish his business that day.

“This is very unfortunate, Miss Innes,” he said, after we had shaken
hands. “Most unfortunate—and mysterious. With the father and mother in
the west, I find everything devolves on me; and, as you can understand,
it is an unpleasant duty.”

“No doubt,” I said absently. “Mr. Harton, I am going to ask you some
questions, and I hope you will answer them. I feel that I am entitled
to some knowledge, because I and my family are just now in a most
ambiguous position.”

I don’t know whether he understood me or not: he took off his glasses
and wiped them.

“I shall be very happy,” he said with old-fashioned courtesy.

“Thank you. Mr. Harton, did Mr. Arnold Armstrong know that Sunnyside
had been rented?”

“I think—yes, he did. In fact, I myself told him about it.”

“And he knew who the tenants were?”

“Yes.”

“He had not been living with the family for some years, I believe?”

“No. Unfortunately, there had been trouble between Arnold and his
father. For two years he had lived in town.”

“Then it would be unlikely that he came here last night to get
possession of anything belonging to him?”

“I should think it hardly possible,” he admitted. “To be perfectly
frank, Miss Innes, I can not think of any reason whatever for his
coming here as he did. He had been staying at the club-house across the
valley for the last week, Jarvis tells me, but that only explains how
he came here, not why. It is a most unfortunate family.”

He shook his head despondently, and I felt that this dried-up little
man was the repository of much that he had not told me. I gave up
trying to elicit any information from him, and we went together to view
the body before it was taken to the city. It had been lifted on to the
billiard-table and a sheet thrown over it; otherwise nothing had been
touched. A soft hat lay beside it, and the collar of the dinner-coat
was still turned up. The handsome, dissipated face of Arnold Armstrong,
purged of its ugly lines, was now only pathetic. As we went in Mrs.
Watson appeared at the card-room door.

“Come in, Mrs. Watson,” the lawyer said. But she shook her head and
withdrew: she was the only one in the house who seemed to regret the
dead man, and even she seemed rather shocked than sorry.

I went to the door at the foot of the circular staircase and opened it.
If I could only have seen Halsey coming at his usual hare-brained clip
up the drive, if I could have heard the throb of the motor, I would
have felt that my troubles were over.

But there was nothing to be seen. The countryside lay sunny and quiet
in its peaceful Sunday afternoon calm, and far down the drive Mr.
Jamieson was walking slowly, stooping now and then, as if to examine
the road. When I went back, Mr. Harton was furtively wiping his eyes.

“The prodigal has come home, Miss Innes,” he said. “How often the sins
of the fathers are visited on the children!” Which left me pondering.

Before Mr. Harton left, he told me something of the Armstrong family.
Paul Armstrong, the father, had been married twice. Arnold was a son by
the first marriage. The second Mrs. Armstrong had been a widow, with a
child, a little girl. This child, now perhaps twenty, was Louise
Armstrong, having taken her stepfather’s name, and was at present in
California with the family.

“They will probably return at once,” he concluded “sad part of my
errand here to-day is to see if you will relinquish your lease here in
their favor.”

“We would better wait and see if they wish to come,” I said. “It seems
unlikely, and my town house is being remodeled.” At that he let the
matter drop, but it came up unpleasantly enough, later.

At six o’clock the body was taken away, and at seven-thirty, after an
early dinner, Mr. Harton went. Gertrude had not come down, and there
was no news of Halsey. Mr. Jamieson had taken a lodging in the village,
and I had not seen him since mid-afternoon. It was about nine o’clock,
I think, when the bell rang and he was ushered into the living-room.

“Sit down,” I said grimly. “Have you found a clue that will incriminate
me, Mr. Jamieson?”

He had the grace to look uncomfortable. “No,” he said. “If you had
killed Mr. Armstrong, you would have left no clues. You would have had
too much intelligence.”

After that we got along better. He was fishing in his pocket, and after
a minute he brought out two scraps of paper. “I have been to the
club-house,” he said, “and among Mr. Armstrong’s effects, I found
these. One is curious; the other is puzzling.”

The first was a sheet of club note-paper, on which was written, over
and over, the name “Halsey B. Innes.” It was Halsey’s flowing signature
to a dot, but it lacked Halsey’s ease. The ones toward the bottom of
the sheet were much better than the top ones. Mr. Jamieson smiled at my
face.

“His old tricks,” he said. “That one is merely curious; this one, as I
said before, is puzzling.”

The second scrap, folded and refolded into a compass so tiny that the
writing had been partly obliterated, was part of a letter—the lower
half of a sheet, not typed, but written in a cramped hand.

“——by altering the plans for——rooms, may be possible. The best way, in
my opinion, would be to——the plan for——in one of the——rooms——chimney.”


That was all.

“Well?” I said, looking up. “There is nothing in that, is there? A man
ought to be able to change the plan of his house without becoming an
object of suspicion.”

“There is little in the paper itself,” he admitted; “but why should
Arnold Armstrong carry that around, unless it meant something? He never
built a house, you may be sure of that. If it is this house, it may
mean anything, from a secret room—”

“To an extra bath-room,” I said scornfully. “Haven’t you a thumb-print,
too?”

“I have,” he said with a smile, “and the print of a foot in a tulip
bed, and a number of other things. The oddest part is, Miss Innes, that
the thumb-mark is probably yours and the footprint certainly.”

His audacity was the only thing that saved me: his amused smile put me
on my mettle, and I ripped out a perfectly good scallop before I
answered.

“Why did I step into the tulip bed?” I asked with interest.

“You picked up something,” he said good-humoredly, “which you are going
to tell me about later.”

“Am I, indeed?” I was politely curious. “With this remarkable insight
of yours, I wish you would tell me where I shall find my
four-thousand-dollar motor car.”

“I was just coming to that,” he said. “You will find it about thirty
miles away, at Andrews Station, in a blacksmith shop, where it is being
repaired.”

I laid down my knitting then and looked at him.

“And Halsey?” I managed to say.

“We are going to exchange information,” he said “I am going to tell you
that, when you tell me what you picked up in the tulip bed.”

We looked steadily at each other: it was not an unfriendly stare; we
were only measuring weapons. Then he smiled a little and got up.

“With your permission,” he said, “I am going to examine the card-room
and the staircase again. You might think over my offer in the
meantime.”

He went on through the drawing-room, and I listened to his footsteps
growing gradually fainter. I dropped my pretense at knitting and,
leaning back, I thought over the last forty-eight hours. Here was I,
Rachel Innes, spinster, a granddaughter of old John Innes of
Revolutionary days, a D. A. R., a Colonial Dame, mixed up with a vulgar
and revolting crime, and even attempting to hoodwink the law! Certainly
I had left the straight and narrow way.

I was roused by hearing Mr. Jamieson coming rapidly back through the
drawing-room. He stopped at the door.

“Miss Innes,” he said quickly, “will you come with me and light the
east corridor? I have fastened somebody in the small room at the head
of the card-room stairs.”

I jumped! up at once.

“You mean—the murderer?” I gasped.

“Possibly,” he said quietly, as we hurried together up the stairs.
“Some one was lurking on the staircase when I went back. I spoke;
instead of an answer, whoever it was turned and ran up. I followed—it
was dark—but as I turned the corner at the top a figure darted through
this door and closed it. The bolt was on my side, and I pushed it
forward. It is a closet, I think.” We were in the upper hall now. “If
you will show me the electric switch, Miss Innes, you would better wait
in your own room.”

Trembling as I was, I was determined to see that door opened. I hardly
knew what I feared, but so many terrible and inexplicable things had
happened that suspense was worse than certainty.

“I am perfectly cool,” I said, “and I am going to remain here.”

The lights flashed up along that end of the corridor, throwing the
doors into relief. At the intersection of the small hallway with the
larger, the circular staircase wound its way up, as if it had been an
afterthought of the architect. And just around the corner, in the small
corridor, was the door Mr. Jamieson had indicated. I was still
unfamiliar with the house, and I did not remember the door. My heart
was thumping wildly in my ears, but I nodded to him to go ahead. I was
perhaps eight or ten feet away—and then he threw the bolt back.

“Come out,” he said quietly. There was no response. “Come—out,” he
repeated. Then—I think he had a revolver, but I am not sure—he stepped
aside and threw the door open.

From where I stood I could not see beyond the door, but I saw Mr.
Jamieson’s face change and heard him mutter something, then he bolted
down the stairs, three at a time. When my knees had stopped shaking, I
moved forward, slowly, nervously, until I had a partial view of what
was beyond the door. It seemed at first to be a closet, empty. Then I
went close and examined it, to stop with a shudder. Where the floor
should have been was black void and darkness, from which came the
indescribable, damp smell of the cellars.

Mr. Jamieson had locked somebody in the clothes chute. As I leaned over
I fancied I heard a groan—or was it the wind?




CHAPTER VII.
A SPRAINED ANKLE


I was panic-stricken. As I ran along the corridor I was confident that
the mysterious intruder and probable murderer had been found, and that
he lay dead or dying at the foot of the chute. I got down the staircase
somehow, and through the kitchen to the basement stairs. Mr. Jamieson
had been before me, and the door stood open. Liddy was standing in the
middle of the kitchen, holding a frying-pan by the handle as a weapon.

“Don’t go down there,” she yelled, when she saw me moving toward the
basement stairs. “Don’t you do it, Miss Rachel. That Jamieson’s down
there now. There’s only trouble comes of hunting ghosts; they lead you
into bottomless pits and things like that. Oh, Miss Rachel, don’t—” as
I tried to get past her.

She was interrupted by Mr. Jamieson’s reappearance. He ran up the
stairs two at a time, and his face was flushed and furious.

“The whole place is locked,” he said angrily. “Where’s the laundry key
kept?”

“It’s kept in the door,” Liddy snapped. “That whole end of the cellar
is kept locked, so nobody can get at the clothes, and then the key’s
left in the door? so that unless a thief was as blind as—as some
detectives, he could walk right in.”

“Liddy,” I said sharply, “come down with us and turn on all the
lights.”

She offered her resignation, as usual, on the spot, but I took her by
the arm, and she came along finally. She switched on all the lights and
pointed to a door just ahead.

“That’s the door,” she said sulkily. “The key’s in it.”

But the key was not in it. Mr. Jamieson shook it, but it was a heavy
door, well locked. And then he stooped and began punching around the
keyhole with the end of a lead-pencil. When he stood up his face was
exultant.

“It’s locked on the inside,” he said in a low tone. “There is somebody
in there.”

“Lord have mercy!” gasped Liddy, and turned to run.

“Liddy,” I called, “go through the house at once and see who is
missing, or if any one is. We’ll have to clear this thing at once. Mr.
Jamieson, if you will watch here I will go to the lodge and find
Warner. Thomas would be of no use. Together you may be able to force
the door.”

“A good idea,” he assented. “But—there are windows, of course, and
there is nothing to prevent whoever is in there from getting out that
way.”

“Then lock the door at the top of the basement stairs,” I suggested,
“and patrol the house from the outside.”

We agreed to this, and I had a feeling that the mystery of Sunnyside
was about to be solved. I ran down the steps and along the drive. Just
at the corner I ran full tilt into somebody who seemed to be as much
alarmed as I was. It was not until I had recoiled a step or two that I
recognized Gertrude, and she me.

“Good gracious, Aunt Ray,” she exclaimed, “what is the matter?”

“There’s somebody locked in the laundry,” I panted. “That is—unless—you
didn’t see any one crossing the lawn or skulking around the house, did
you?”

“I think we have mystery on the brain,” Gertrude said wearily. “No, I
haven’t seen any one, except old Thomas, who looked for all the world
as if he had been ransacking the pantry. What have you locked in the
laundry?”

“I can’t wait to explain,” I replied. “I must get Warner from the
lodge. If you came out for air, you’d better put on your overshoes.”
And then I noticed that Gertrude was limping—not much, but sufficiently
to make her progress very slow, and seemingly painful.

“You have hurt yourself,” I said sharply.

“I fell over the carriage block,” she explained. “I thought perhaps I
might see Halsey coming home. He—he ought to be here.”

I hurried on down the drive. The lodge was some distance from the
house, in a grove of trees where the drive met the county road. There
were two white stone pillars to mark the entrance, but the iron gates,
once closed and tended by the lodge-keeper, now stood permanently open.
The day of the motor-car had come; no one had time for closed gates and
lodge-keepers. The lodge at Sunnyside was merely a sort of
supplementary servants’ quarters: it was as convenient in its
appointments as the big house and infinitely more cozy.

As I went down the drive, my thoughts were busy. Who would it be that
Mr. Jamieson had trapped in the cellar? Would we find a body or some
one badly injured? Scarcely either. Whoever had fallen had been able to
lock the laundry door on the inside. If the fugitive had come from
outside the house, how did he get in? If it was some member of the
household, who could it have been? And then—a feeling of horror almost
overwhelmed me. Gertrude! Gertrude and her injured ankle! Gertrude
found limping slowly up the drive when I had thought she was in bed!

I tried to put the thought away, but it would not go. If Gertrude had
been on the circular staircase that night, why had she fled from Mr.
Jamieson? The idea, puzzling as it was, seemed borne out by this
circumstance. Whoever had taken refuge at the head of the stairs could
scarcely have been familiar with the house, or with the location of the
chute. The mystery seemed to deepen constantly. What possible
connection could there be between Halsey and Gertrude, and the murder
of Arnold Armstrong? And yet, every way I turned I seemed to find
something that pointed to such a connection.

At the foot of the drive the road described a long, sloping,
horseshoe-shaped curve around the lodge. There were lights there,
streaming cheerfully out on to the trees, and from an upper room came
wavering shadows, as if some one with a lamp was moving around. I had
come almost silently in my evening slippers, and I had my second
collision of the evening on the road just above the house. I ran full
into a man in a long coat, who was standing in the shadow beside the
drive, with his back to me, watching the lighted windows.

“What the hell!” he ejaculated furiously, and turned around. When he
saw me, however, he did not wait for any retort on my part. He faded
away—this is not slang; he did—he absolutely disappeared in the dusk
without my getting more than a glimpse of his face. I had a vague
impression of unfamiliar features and of a sort of cap with a visor.
Then he was gone.

I went to the lodge and rapped. It required two or three poundings to
bring Thomas to the door, and he opened it only an inch or so.

“Where is Warner?” I asked.

“I—I think he’s in bed, ma’m.”

“Get him up,” I said, “and for goodness’ sake open the door, Thomas.
I’ll wait for Warner.”

“It’s kind o’ close in here, ma’m,” he said, obeying gingerly, and
disclosing a cool and comfortable looking interior. “Perhaps you’d keer
to set on the porch an’ rest yo’self.”

It was so evident that Thomas did not want me inside that I went in.

“Tell Warner he is needed in a hurry,” I repeated, and turned into the
little sitting-room. I could hear Thomas going up the stairs, could
hear him rouse Warner, and the steps of the chauffeur as he hurriedly
dressed. But my attention was busy with the room below.

On the center-table, open, was a sealskin traveling bag. It was filled
with gold-topped bottles and brushes, and it breathed opulence, luxury,
femininity from every inch of surface. How did it get there? I was
still asking myself the question when Warner came running down the
stairs and into the room. He was completely but somewhat incongruously
dressed, and his open, boyish face looked abashed. He was a country
boy, absolutely frank and reliable, of fair education and
intelligence—one of the small army of American youths who turn a
natural aptitude for mechanics into the special field of the
automobile, and earn good salaries in a congenial occupation.

“What is it, Miss Innes?” he asked anxiously.

“There is some one locked in the laundry,” I replied. “Mr. Jamieson
wants you to help him break the lock. Warner, whose bag is this?”

He was in the doorway by this time, and he pretended not to hear.

“Warner,” I called, “come back here. Whose bag is this?”

He stopped then, but he did not turn around.

“It’s—it belongs to Thomas,” he said, and fled up the drive.

To Thomas! A London bag with mirrors and cosmetic jars of which Thomas
could not even have guessed the use! However, I put the bag in the back
of my mind, which was fast becoming stored with anomalous and
apparently irreconcilable facts, and followed Warner to the house.

Liddy had come back to the kitchen: the door to the basement stairs was
double-barred, and had a table pushed against it; and beside her on the
table was most of the kitchen paraphernalia.

“Did you see if there was any one missing in the house?” I asked,
ignoring the array of sauce-pans rolling-pins, and the poker of the
range.

“Rosie is missing,” Liddy said with unction. She had objected to Rosie,
the parlor maid, from the start. “Mrs. Watson went into her room, and
found she had gone without her hat. People that trust themselves a
dozen miles from the city, in strange houses, with servants they don’t
know, needn’t be surprised if they wake up some morning and find their
throats cut.”

After which carefully veiled sarcasm Liddy relapsed into gloom. Warner
came in then with a handful of small tools, and Mr. Jamieson went with
him to the basement. Oddly enough, I was not alarmed. With all my heart
I wished for Halsey, but I was not frightened. At the door he was to
force, Warner put down his tools and looked at it. Then he turned the
handle. Without the slightest difficulty the door opened, revealing the
blackness of the drying-room beyond!

Mr. Jamieson gave an exclamation of disgust.

“Gone!” he said. “Confound such careless work! I might have known.”

It was true enough. We got the lights on finally and looked all through
the three rooms that constituted this wing of the basement. Everything
was quiet and empty. An explanation of how the fugitive had escaped
injury was found in a heaped-up basket of clothes under the chute. The
basket had been overturned, but that was all. Mr. Jamieson examined the
windows: one was unlocked, and offered an easy escape. The window or
the door? Which way had the fugitive escaped? The door seemed most
probable, and I hoped it had been so. I could not have borne, just
then, to think that it was my poor Gertrude we had been hounding
through the darkness, and yet—I had met Gertrude not far from that very
window.

I went up-stairs at last, tired and depressed. Mrs. Watson and Liddy
were making tea in the kitchen. In certain walks of life the tea-pot is
the refuge in times of stress, trouble or sickness: they give tea to
the dying and they put it in the baby’s nursing bottle. Mrs. Watson was
fixing a tray to be sent in to me, and when I asked her about Rosie she
confirmed her absence.

“She’s not here,” she said; “but I would not think much of that, Miss
Innes. Rosie is a pretty young girl, and perhaps she has a sweetheart.
It will be a good thing if she has. The maids stay much better when
they have something like that to hold them here.”

Gertrude had gone back to her room, and while I was drinking my cup of
hot tea, Mr. Jamieson came in.

“We might take up the conversation where we left off an hour and a half
ago,” he said. “But before we go on, I want to say this: The person who
escaped from the laundry was a woman with a foot of moderate size and
well arched. She wore nothing but a stocking on her right foot, and, in
spite of the unlocked door, she escaped by the window.”

And again I thought of Gertrude’s sprained ankle. Was it the right or
the left?




CHAPTER VIII.
THE OTHER HALF OF THE LINE


“Miss Innes,” the detective began, “what is your opinion of the figure
you saw on the east veranda the night you and your maid were in the
house alone?”

“It was a woman,” I said positively.

“And yet your maid affirms with equal positiveness that it was a man.”

“Nonsense,” I broke in. “Liddy had her eyes shut—she always shuts them
when she’s frightened.”

“And you never thought then that the intruder who came later that night
might be a woman—the woman, in fact, whom you saw on the veranda?”

“I had reasons for thinking it was a man,” I said, remembering the pearl
cuff-link.

“Now we are getting down to business. WHAT were your reasons for
thinking that?”

I hesitated.

“If you have any reason for believing that your midnight guest was Mr.
Armstrong, other than his visit here the next night, you ought to tell
me, Miss Innes. We can take nothing for granted. If, for instance, the
intruder who dropped the bar and scratched the staircase—you see, I
know about that—if this visitor was a woman, why should not the same
woman have come back the following night, met Mr. Armstrong on the
circular staircase, and in alarm shot him?”

“It was a man,” I reiterated. And then, because I could think of no
other reason for my statement, I told him about the pearl cuff-link. He
was intensely interested.

“Will you give me the link,” he said, when I finished, “or, at least,
let me see it? I consider it a most important clue.”

“Won’t the description do?”

“Not as well as the original.”

“Well, I’m very sorry,” I said, as calmly as I could, “I—the thing is
lost. It—it must have fallen out of a box on my dressing-table.”

Whatever he thought of my explanation, and I knew he doubted it, he
made no sign. He asked me to describe the link accurately, and I did
so, while he glanced at a list he took from his pocket.

“One set monogram cuff-links,” he read, “one set plain pearl links, one
set cuff-links, woman’s head set with diamonds and emeralds. There is
no mention of such a link as you describe, and yet, if your theory is
right, Mr. Armstrong must have taken back in his cuffs one complete
cuff-link, and a half, perhaps, of the other.”

The idea was new to me. If it had not been the murdered man who had
entered the house that night, who had it been?

“There are a number of strange things connected with this case,” the
detective went on. “Miss Gertrude Innes testified that she heard some
one fumbling with the lock, that the door opened, and that almost
immediately the shot was fired. Now, Miss Innes, here is the strange
part of that. Mr. Armstrong had no key with him. There was no key in
the lock, or on the floor. In other words, the evidence points
absolutely to this: Mr. Armstrong was admitted to the house from
within.”

“It is impossible,” I broke in. “Mr. Jamieson, do you know what your
words imply? Do you know that you are practically accusing Gertrude
Innes of admitting that man?”

“Not quite that,” he said, with his friendly smile. “In fact, Miss
Innes, I am quite certain she did not. But as long as I learn only
parts of the truth, from both you and her, what can I do? I know you
picked up something in the flower bed: you refuse to tell me what it
was. I know Miss Gertrude went back to the billiard-room to get
something, she refuses to say what. You suspect what happened to the
cuff-link, but you won’t tell me. So far, all I am sure of is this: I
do not believe Arnold Armstrong was the midnight visitor who so alarmed
you by dropping—shall we say, a golf-stick? And I believe that when he
did come he was admitted by some one in the house. Who knows—it may
have been—Liddy!”

I stirred my tea angrily.

“I have always heard,” I said dryly, “that undertakers’ assistants are
jovial young men. A man’s sense of humor seems to be in inverse
proportion to the gravity of his profession.”

“A man’s sense of humor is a barbarous and a cruel thing, Miss Innes,”
he admitted. “It is to the feminine as the hug of a bear is to the
scratch of—well;—anything with claws. Is that you, Thomas? Come in.”

Thomas Johnson stood in the doorway. He looked alarmed and
apprehensive, and suddenly I remembered the sealskin dressing-bag in
the lodge. Thomas came just inside the door and stood with his head
drooping, his eyes, under their shaggy gray brows, fixed on Mr.
Jamieson.

“Thomas,” said the detective, not unkindly, “I sent for you to tell us
what you told Sam Bohannon at the club, the day before Mr. Arnold was
found here, dead. Let me see. You came here Friday night to see Miss
Innes, didn’t you? And came to work here Saturday morning?”

For some unexplained reason Thomas looked relieved.

“Yas, sah,” he said. “You see it were like this: When Mistah Armstrong
and the fam’ly went away, Mis’ Watson an’ me, we was lef’ in charge
till the place was rented. Mis’ Watson, she’ve bin here a good while,
an’ she warn’ skeery. So she slep’ in the house. I’d bin havin’
tokens—I tol’ Mis’ Innes some of ’em—an’ I slep’ in the lodge. Then one
day Mis’ Watson, she came to me an’ she sez, sez she, ‘Thomas, you’ll
hev to sleep up in the big house. I’m too nervous to do it any more.’
But I jes’ reckon to myself that ef it’s too skeery fer her, it’s too
skeery fer me. We had it, then, sho’ nuff, and it ended up with Mis’
Watson stayin’ in the lodge nights an’ me lookin’ fer work at de club.”

“Did Mrs. Watson say that anything had happened to alarm her?”

“No, sah. She was jes’ natchally skeered. Well, that was all, far’s I
know, until the night I come over to see Mis’ Innes. I come across the
valley, along the path from the club-house, and I goes home that way.
Down in the creek bottom I almost run into a man. He wuz standin’ with
his back to me, an’ he was workin’ with one of these yere electric
light things that fit in yer pocket. He was havin’ trouble—one minute
it’d flash out, an’ the nex’ it’d be gone. I hed a view of ’is white
dress shirt an’ tie, as I passed. I didn’t see his face. But I know it
warn’t Mr. Arnold. It was a taller man than Mr. Arnold. Beside that,
Mr. Arnold was playin’ cards when I got to the club-house, same’s he’d
been doin’ all day.”

“And the next morning you came back along the path,” pursued Mr.
Jamieson relentlessly.

“The nex’ mornin’ I come back along the path an’ down where I dun see
the man night befoh, I picked up this here.” The old man held out a
tiny object and Mr. Jamieson took it. Then he held it on his extended
palm for me to see. It was the other half of the pearl cuff-link!

But Mr. Jamieson was not quite through questioning him.

“And so you showed it to Sam, at the club, and asked him if he knew any
one who owned such a link, and Sam said—what?”

“Wal, Sam, he ’lowed he’d seen such a pair of cuff-buttons in a shirt
belongin’ to Mr. Bailey—Mr. Jack Bailey, sah.”

“I’ll keep this link, Thomas, for a while,” the detective said. “That’s
all I wanted to know. Good night.”

As Thomas shuffled out, Mr. Jamieson watched me sharply.

“You see, Miss Innes,” he said, “Mr. Bailey insists on mixing himself
with this thing. If Mr. Bailey came here that Friday night expecting to
meet Arnold Armstrong, and missed him—if, as I say, he had done this,
might he not, seeing him enter the following night, have struck him
down, as he had intended before?”

“But the motive?” I gasped.

“There could be motive proved, I think. Arnold Armstrong and John
Bailey have been enemies since the latter, as cashier of the Traders’
Bank, brought Arnold almost into the clutches of the law. Also, you
forget that both men have been paying attention to Miss Gertrude.
Bailey’s flight looks bad, too.”

“And you think Halsey helped him to escape?”

“Undoubtedly. Why, what could it be but flight? Miss Innes, let me
reconstruct that evening, as I see it. Bailey and Armstrong had
quarreled at the club. I learned this to-day. Your nephew brought
Bailey over. Prompted by jealous, insane fury, Armstrong followed,
coming across by the path. He entered the billiard-room wing—perhaps
rapping, and being admitted by your nephew. Just inside he was shot, by
some one on the circular staircase. The shot fired, your nephew and
Bailey left the house at once, going toward the automobile house. They
left by the lower road, which prevented them being heard, and when you
and Miss Gertrude got down-stairs everything was quiet.”

“But—Gertrude’s story,” I stammered.

“Miss Gertrude only brought forward her explanation the following
morning. I do not believe it, Miss Innes. It is the story of a loving
and ingenious woman.”

“And—this thing to-night?”

“May upset my whole view of the case. We must give the benefit of every
doubt, after all. We may, for instance, come back to the figure on the
porch: if it was a woman you saw that night through the window, we
might start with other premises. Or Mr. Innes’ explanation may turn us
in a new direction. It is possible that he shot Arnold Armstrong as a
burglar and then fled, frightened at what he had done. In any case,
however, I feel confident that the body was here when he left. Mr.
Armstrong left the club ostensibly for a moonlight saunter, about half
after eleven o’clock. It was three when the shot was fired.”

I leaned back bewildered. It seemed to me that the evening had been
full of significant happenings, had I only held the key. Had Gertrude
been the fugitive in the clothes chute? Who was the man on the drive
near the lodge, and whose gold-mounted dressing-bag had I seen in the
lodge sitting-room?

It was late when Mr. Jamieson finally got up to go. I went with him to
the door, and together we stood looking out over the valley. Below lay
the village of Casanova, with its Old World houses, its blossoming
trees and its peace. Above on the hill across the valley were the
lights of the Greenwood Club. It was even possible to see the curving
row of parallel lights that marked the carriage road. Rumors that I had
heard about the club came back—of drinking, of high play, and once, a
year ago, of a suicide under those very lights.

Mr. Jamieson left, taking a short cut to the village, and I still stood
there. It must have been after eleven, and the monotonous tick of the
big clock on the stairs behind me was the only sound.

Then I was conscious that some one was running up the drive. In a
minute a woman darted into the area of light made by the open door, and
caught me by the arm. It was Rosie—Rosie in a state of collapse from
terror, and, not the least important, clutching one of my Coalport
plates and a silver spoon.

She stood staring into the darkness behind, still holding the plate. I
got her into the house and secured the plate; then I stood and looked
down at her where she crouched tremblingly against the doorway.

“Well,” I asked, “didn’t your young man enjoy his meal?”

She couldn’t speak. She looked at the spoon she still held—I wasn’t so
anxious about it: thank Heaven, it wouldn’t chip—and then she stared at
me.

“I appreciate your desire to have everything nice for him,” I went on,
“but the next time, you might take the Limoges china. It’s more easily
duplicated and less expensive.”

“I haven’t a young man—not here.” She had got her breath now, as I had
guessed she would. “I—I have been chased by a thief, Miss Innes.”

“Did he chase you out of the house and back again?” I asked.

Then Rosie began to cry—not silently, but noisily, hysterically.

I stopped her by giving her a good shake.

“What in the world is the matter with you?” I snapped. “Has the day of
good common sense gone by! Sit up and tell me the whole thing.” Rosie
sat up then, and sniffled.

“I was coming up the drive—” she began.

“You must start with when you went DOWN the drive, with my dishes and
my silver,” I interrupted, but, seeing more signs of hysteria, I gave
in. “Very well. You were coming up the drive—”

“I had a basket of—of silver and dishes on my arm and I was carrying
the plate, because—because I was afraid I’d break it. Part-way up the
road a man stepped out of the bushes, and held his arm like this,
spread out, so I couldn’t get past. He said—he said—‘Not so fast, young
lady; I want you to let me see what’s in that basket.’”

She got up in her excitement and took hold of my arm.

“It was like this, Miss Innes,” she said, “and say you was the man.
When he said that, I screamed and ducked under his arm like this. He
caught at the basket and I dropped it. I ran as fast as I could, and he
came after as far as the trees. Then he stopped. Oh, Miss Innes, it
must have been the man that killed that Mr. Armstrong!”

“Don’t be foolish,” I said. “Whoever killed Mr. Armstrong would put as
much space between himself and this house as he could. Go up to bed
now; and mind, if I hear of this story being repeated to the other
maids, I shall deduct from your wages for every broken dish I find in
the drive.”

I listened to Rosie as she went up-stairs, running past the shadowy
places and slamming her door. Then I sat down and looked at the
Coalport plate and the silver spoon. I had brought my own china and
silver, and, from all appearances, I would have little enough to take
back. But though I might jeer at Rosie as much as I wished, the fact
remained that some one had been on the drive that night who had no
business there. Although neither had Rosie, for that matter.

I could fancy Liddy’s face when she missed the extra pieces of
china—she had opposed Rosie from the start. If Liddy once finds a
prophecy fulfilled, especially an unpleasant one, she never allows me
to forget it. It seemed to me that it was absurd to leave that china
dotted along the road for her to spy the next morning; so with a sudden
resolution, I opened the door again and stepped out into the darkness.
As the door closed behind me I half regretted my impulse; then I shut
my teeth and went on.

I have never been a nervous woman, as I said before. Moreover, a minute
or two in the darkness enabled me to see things fairly well. Beulah
gave me rather a start by rubbing unexpectedly against my feet; then we
two, side by side, went down the drive.

There were no fragments of china, but where the grove began I picked up
a silver spoon. So far Rosie’s story was borne out: I began to wonder
if it were not indiscreet, to say the least, this midnight prowling in
a neighborhood with such a deservedly bad reputation. Then I saw
something gleaming, which proved to be the handle of a cup, and a step
or two farther on I found a V-shaped bit of a plate. But the most
surprising thing of all was to find the basket sitting comfortably
beside the road, with the rest of the broken crockery piled neatly
within, and a handful of small silver, spoons, forks, and the like, on
top! I could only stand and stare. Then Rosie’s story was true. But
where had Rosie carried her basket? And why had the thief, if he were a
thief, picked up the broken china out of the road and left it, with his
booty?

It was with my nearest approach to a nervous collapse that I heard the
familiar throbbing of an automobile engine. As it came closer I
recognized the outline of the Dragon Fly, and knew that Halsey had come
back.

Strange enough it must have seemed to Halsey, too, to come across me in
the middle of the night, with the skirt of my gray silk gown over my
shoulders to keep off the dew, holding a red and green basket under one
arm and a black cat under the other. What with relief and joy, I began
to cry, right there, and very nearly wiped my eyes on Beulah in the
excitement.




CHAPTER IX.
JUST LIKE A GIRL


“Aunt Ray!” Halsey said from the gloom behind the lamps. “What in the
world are you doing here?”

“Taking a walk,” I said, trying to be composed. I don’t think the
answer struck either of us as being ridiculous at the time. “Oh,
Halsey, where have you been?”

“Let me take you up to the house.” He was in the road, and had Beulah
and the basket out of my arms in a moment. I could see the car plainly
now, and Warner was at the wheel—Warner in an ulster and a pair of
slippers, over Heaven knows what. Jack Bailey was not there. I got in,
and we went slowly and painfully up to the house.

We did not talk. What we had to say was too important to commence
there, and, besides, it took all kinds of coaxing from both men to get
the Dragon Fly up the last grade. Only when we had closed the front
door and stood facing each other in the hall, did Halsey say anything.
He slipped his strong young arm around my shoulders and turned me so I
faced the light.

“Poor Aunt Ray!” he said gently. And I nearly wept again. “I—I must see
Gertrude, too; we will have a three-cornered talk.”

And then Gertrude herself came down the stairs. She had not been to
bed, evidently: she still wore the white negligée she had worn earlier
in the evening, and she limped somewhat. During her slow progress down
the stairs I had time to notice one thing: Mr. Jamieson had said the
woman who escaped from the cellar had worn no shoe on her right foot.
Gertrude’s right ankle was the one she had sprained!

The meeting between brother and sister was tense, but without tears.
Halsey kissed her tenderly, and I noticed evidences of strain and
anxiety in both young faces.

“Is everything—right?” she asked.

“Right as can be,” with forced cheerfulness.

I lighted the living-room and we went in there. Only a half-hour before
I had sat with Mr. Jamieson in that very room, listening while he
overtly accused both Gertrude and Halsey of at least a knowledge of the
death of Arnold Armstrong. Now Halsey was here to speak for himself: I
should learn everything that had puzzled me.

“I saw it in the paper to-night for the first time,” he was saying. “It
knocked me dumb. When I think of this houseful of women, and a thing
like that occurring!”

Gertrude’s face was still set and white. “That isn’t all, Halsey,” she
said. “You and—and Jack left almost at the time it happened. The
detective here thinks that you—that we—know something about it.”

“The devil he does!” Halsey’s eyes were fairly starting from his head.
“I beg your pardon, Aunt Ray, but—the fellow’s a lunatic.”

“Tell me everything, won’t you, Halsey?” I begged. “Tell me where you
went that night, or rather morning, and why you went as you did. This
has been a terrible forty-eight hours for all of us.”

He stood staring at me, and I could see the horror of the situation
dawning in his face.

“I can’t tell you where I went, Aunt Ray,” he said, after a moment. “As
to why, you will learn that soon enough. But Gertrude knows that Jack
and I left the house before this thing—this horrible murder—occurred.”

“Mr. Jamieson does not believe me,” Gertrude said drearily. “Halsey, if
the worst comes, if they should arrest you, you must—tell.”

“I shall tell nothing,” he said with a new sternness in his voice.
“Aunt Ray, it was necessary for Jack and me to leave that night. I can
not tell you why—just yet. As to where we went, if I have to depend on
that as an alibi, I shall not tell. The whole thing is an absurdity, a
trumped-up charge that can not possibly be serious.”

“Has Mr. Bailey gone back to the city,” I demanded, “or to the club?”

“Neither,” defiantly; “at the present moment I do not know where he
is.”

“Halsey,” I asked gravely, leaning forward, “have you the slightest
suspicion who killed Arnold Armstrong? The police think he was admitted
from within, and that he was shot down from above, by someone on the
circular staircase.”

“I know nothing of it,” he maintained; but I fancied I caught a sudden
glance at Gertrude, a flash of something that died as it came.

As quietly, as calmly as I could, I went over the whole story, from the
night Liddy and I had been alone up to the strange experience of Rosie
and her pursuer. The basket still stood on the table, a mute witness to
this last mystifying occurrence.

“There is something else,” I said hesitatingly, at the last. “Halsey, I
have never told this even to Gertrude, but the morning after the crime,
I found, in a tulip bed, a revolver. It—it was yours, Halsey.”

For an appreciable moment Halsey stared at me. Then he turned to
Gertrude.

“My revolver, Trude!” he exclaimed. “Why, Jack took my revolver with
him, didn’t he?”

“Oh, for Heaven’s sake don’t say that,” I implored. “The detective
thinks possibly Jack Bailey came back, and—and the thing happened
then.”

“He didn’t come back,” Halsey said sternly. “Gertrude, when you brought
down a revolver that night for Jack to take with him, what one did you
bring? Mine?”

Gertrude was defiant now.

“No. Yours was loaded, and I was afraid of what Jack might do. I gave
him one I have had for a year or two. It was empty.”

Halsey threw up both hands despairingly.

“If that isn’t like a girl!” he said. “Why didn’t you do what I asked
you to, Gertrude? You send Bailey off with an empty gun, and throw mine
in a tulip bed, of all places on earth! Mine was a thirty-eight
caliber. The inquest will show, of course, that the bullet that killed
Armstrong was a thirty-eight. Then where shall I be?”

“You forget,” I broke in, “that I have the revolver, and that no one
knows about it.”

But Gertrude had risen angrily.

“I can not stand it; it is always with me,” she cried. “Halsey, I did
not throw your revolver into the tulip bed. I—think—you—did
it—yourself!”

They stared at each other across the big library table, with young eyes
all at once hard, suspicious. And then Gertrude held out both hands to
him appealingly.

“We must not,” she said brokenly. “Just now, with so much at stake,
it—is shameful. I know you are as ignorant as I am. Make me believe it,
Halsey.”

Halsey soothed her as best he could, and the breach seemed healed. But
long after I went to bed he sat down-stairs in the living-room alone,
and I knew he was going over the case as he had learned it. Some things
were clear to him that were dark to me. He knew, and Gertrude, too, why
Jack Bailey and he had gone away that night, as they did. He knew where
they had been for the last forty-eight hours, and why Jack Bailey had
not returned with him. It seemed to me that without fuller confidence
from both the children—they are always children to me—I should never be
able to learn anything.

As I was finally getting ready for bed, Halsey came up-stairs and
knocked at my door. When I had got into a negligée—I used to say
wrapper before Gertrude came back from school—I let him in. He stood in
the doorway a moment, and then he went into agonies of silent mirth. I
sat down on the side of the bed and waited in severe silence for him to
stop, but he only seemed to grow worse.

When he had recovered he took me by the elbow and pulled me in front of
the mirror.

“‘How to be beautiful,’” he quoted. “‘Advice to maids and matrons,’ by
Beatrice Fairfax!” And then I saw myself. I had neglected to remove my
wrinkle eradicators, and I presume my appearance was odd. I believe
that it is a woman’s duty to care for her looks, but it is much like
telling a necessary falsehood—one must not be found out. By the time I
got them off Halsey was serious again, and I listened to his story.

“Aunt Ray,” he began, extinguishing his cigarette on the back of my
ivory hair-brush, “I would give a lot to tell you the whole thing.
But—I can’t, for a day or so, anyhow. But one thing I might have told
you a long time ago. If you had known it, you would not have suspected
me for a moment of—of having anything to do with the attack on Arnold
Armstrong. Goodness knows what I might do to a fellow like that, if
there was enough provocation, and I had a gun in my hand—under ordinary
circumstances. But—I care a great deal about Louise Armstrong, Aunt
Ray. I hope to marry her some day. Is it likely I would kill her
brother?”

“Her stepbrother,” I corrected. “No, of course, it isn’t likely, or
possible. Why didn’t you tell me, Halsey?”

“Well, there were two reasons,” he said slowly. “One was that you had a
girl already picked out for me—”

“Nonsense,” I broke in, and felt myself growing red. I had, indeed, one
of the—but no matter.

“And the second reason,” he pursued, “was that the Armstrongs would
have none of me.”

I sat bolt upright at that and gasped.

“The Armstrongs!” I repeated. “With old Peter Armstrong driving a stage
across the mountains while your grandfather was war governor—”

“Well, of course, the war governor’s dead, and out of the matrimonial
market,” Halsey interrupted. “And the present Innes admits himself he
isn’t good enough for—for Louise.”

“Exactly,” I said despairingly, “and, of course, you are taken at your
own valuation. The Inneses are not always so self-depreciatory.”

“Not always, no,” he said, looking at me with his boyish smile.
“Fortunately, Louise doesn’t agree with her family. She’s willing to
take me, war governor or no, provided her mother consents. She isn’t
overly-fond of her stepfather, but she adores her mother. And now,
can’t you see where this thing puts me? Down and out, with all of
them.”

“But the whole thing is absurd,” I argued. “And besides, Gertrude’s
sworn statement that you left before Arnold Armstrong came would clear
you at once.”

Halsey got up and began to pace the room, and the air of cheerfulness
dropped like a mask.

“She can’t swear it,” he said finally. “Gertrude’s story was true as
far as it went, but she didn’t tell everything. Arnold Armstrong came
here at two-thirty—came into the billiard-room and left in five
minutes. He came to bring—something.”

“Halsey,” I cried, “you _must_ tell me the whole truth. Every time I
see a way for you to escape you block it yourself with this wall of
mystery. What did he bring?”

“A telegram—for Bailey,” he said. “It came by special messenger from
town, and was—most important. Bailey had started for here, and the
messenger had gone back to the city. The steward gave it to Arnold, who
had been drinking all day and couldn’t sleep, and was going for a
stroll in the direction of Sunnyside.”

“And he brought it?”

“Yes.”

“What was in the telegram?”

“I can tell you—as soon as certain things are made public. It is only a
matter of days now,” gloomily.

“And Gertrude’s story of a telephone message?”

“Poor Trude!” he half whispered. “Poor loyal little girl! Aunt Ray,
there was no such message. No doubt your detective already knows that
and discredits all Gertrude told him.”

“And when she went back, it was to get—the telegram?”

“Probably,” Halsey said slowly. “When you get to thinking about it,
Aunt Ray, it looks bad for all three of us, doesn’t it? And yet—I will
take my oath none of us even inadvertently killed that poor devil.”

I looked at the closed door into Gertrude’s dressing-room, and lowered
my voice.

“The same horrible thought keeps recurring to me,” I whispered.
“Halsey, Gertrude probably had your revolver: she must have examined
it, anyhow, that night. After you—and Jack had gone, what if that
ruffian came back, and she—and she—”

I couldn’t finish. Halsey stood looking at me with shut lips.

“She might have heard him fumbling at the door—he had no key, the
police say—and thinking it was you, or Jack, she admitted him. When she
saw her mistake she ran up the stairs, a step or two, and turning, like
an animal at bay, she fired.”

Halsey had his hand over my lips before I finished, and in that
position we stared each at the other, our stricken glances crossing.

“The revolver—my revolver—thrown into the tulip bed!” he muttered to
himself. “Thrown perhaps from an upper window: you say it was buried
deep. Her prostration ever since, her—Aunt Ray, you don’t think it was
Gertrude who fell down the clothes chute?”

I could only nod my head in a hopeless affirmative.




CHAPTER X.
THE TRADERS’ BANK


The morning after Halsey’s return was Tuesday. Arnold Armstrong had
been found dead at the foot of the circular staircase at three o’clock
on Sunday morning. The funeral services were to be held on Tuesday, and
the interment of the body was to be deferred until the Armstrongs
arrived from California. No one, I think, was very sorry that Arnold
Armstrong was dead, but the manner of his death aroused some sympathy
and an enormous amount of curiosity. Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh, a cousin,
took charge of the arrangements, and everything, I believe, was as
quiet as possible. I gave Thomas Johnson and Mrs. Watson permission to
go into town to pay their last respects to the dead man, but for some
reason they did not care to go.

Halsey spent part of the day with Mr. Jamieson, but he said nothing of
what happened. He looked grave and anxious, and he had a long
conversation with Gertrude late in the afternoon.

Tuesday evening found us quiet, with the quiet that precedes an
explosion. Gertrude and Halsey were both gloomy and distraught, and as
Liddy had already discovered that some of the china was broken—it is
impossible to have any secrets from an old servant—I was not in a
pleasant humor myself. Warner brought up the afternoon mail and the
evening papers at seven—I was curious to know what the papers said of
the murder. We had turned away at least a dozen reporters. But I read
over the head-line that ran half-way across the top of the _Gazette_
twice before I comprehended it. Halsey had opened the _Chronicle_ and
was staring at it fixedly.

“The Traders’ Bank closes its doors!” was what I read, and then I put
down the paper and looked across the table.

“Did you know of this?” I asked Halsey.

“I expected it. But not so soon,” he replied.

“And you?” to Gertrude.

“Jack—told us—something,” Gertrude said faintly. “Oh, Halsey, what can
he do now?”

“Jack!” I said scornfully. “Your Jack’s flight is easy enough to
explain now. And you helped him, both of you, to get away! You get that
from your mother; it isn’t an Innes trait. Do you know that every
dollar you have, both of you, is in that bank?”

Gertrude tried to speak, but Halsey stopped her.

“That isn’t all, Gertrude,” he said quietly; “Jack is—under arrest.”

“Under arrest!” Gertrude screamed, and tore the paper out of his hand.
She glanced at the heading, then she crumpled the newspaper into a ball
and flung it to the floor. While Halsey, looking stricken and white,
was trying to smooth it out and read it, Gertrude had dropped her head
on the table and was sobbing stormily.

I have the clipping somewhere, but just now I can remember only the
essentials.

On the afternoon before, Monday, while the Traders’ Bank was in the
rush of closing hour, between two and three, Mr. Jacob Trautman,
President of the Pearl Brewing Company, came into the bank to lift a
loan. As security for the loan he had deposited some three hundred
International Steamship Company 5’s, in total value three hundred
thousand dollars. Mr. Trautman went to the loan clerk and, after
certain formalities had been gone through, the loan clerk went to the
vault. Mr. Trautman, who was a large and genial German, waited for a
time, whistling under his breath. The loan clerk did not come back.
After an interval, Mr. Trautman saw the loan clerk emerge from the
vault and go to the assistant cashier: the two went hurriedly to the
vault. A lapse of another ten minutes, and the assistant cashier came
out and approached Mr. Trautman. He was noticeably white and trembling.
Mr. Trautman was told that through an oversight the bonds had been
misplaced, and was asked to return the following morning, when
everything would be made all right.

Mr. Trautman, however, was a shrewd business man, and he did not like
the appearance of things. He left the bank apparently satisfied, and
within thirty minutes he had called up three different members of the
Traders’ Board of Directors. At three-thirty there was a hastily
convened board meeting, with some stormy scenes, and late in the
afternoon a national bank examiner was in possession of the books. The
bank had not opened for business on Tuesday.

At twelve-thirty o’clock the Saturday before, as soon as the business
of the day was closed, Mr. John Bailey, the cashier of the defunct
bank, had taken his hat and departed. During the afternoon he had
called up Mr. Aronson, a member of the board, and said he was ill, and
might not be at the bank for a day or two. As Bailey was highly thought
of, Mr. Aronson merely expressed a regret. From that time until Monday
night, when Mr. Bailey had surrendered to the police, little was known
of his movements. Some time after one on Saturday he had entered the
Western Union office at Cherry and White Streets and had sent two
telegrams. He was at the Greenwood Country Club on Saturday night, and
appeared unlike himself. It was reported that he would be released
under enormous bond, some time that day, Tuesday.

The article closed by saying that while the officers of the bank
refused to talk until the examiner had finished his work, it was known
that securities aggregating a million and a quarter were missing. Then
there was a diatribe on the possibility of such an occurrence; on the
folly of a one-man bank, and of a Board of Directors that met only to
lunch together and to listen to a brief report from the cashier, and on
the poor policy of a government that arranges a three or four-day
examination twice a year. The mystery, it insinuated, had not been
cleared by the arrest of the cashier. Before now minor officials had
been used to cloak the misdeeds of men higher up. Inseparable as the
words “speculation” and “peculation” have grown to be, John Bailey was
not known to be in the stock market. His only words, after his
surrender, had been “Send for Mr. Armstrong at once.” The telegraph
message which had finally reached the President of the Traders’ Bank,
in an interior town in California, had been responded to by a telegram
from Doctor Walker, the young physician who was traveling with the
Armstrong family, saying that Paul Armstrong was very ill and unable to
travel.

That was how things stood that Tuesday evening. The Traders’ Bank had
suspended payment, and John Bailey was under arrest, charged with
wrecking it; Paul Armstrong lay very ill in California, and his only
son had been murdered two days before. I sat dazed and bewildered. The
children’s money was gone: that was bad enough, though I had plenty, if
they would let me share. But Gertrude’s grief was beyond any power of
mine to comfort; the man she had chosen stood accused of a colossal
embezzlement—and even worse. For in the instant that I sat there I
seemed to see the coils closing around John Bailey as the murderer of
Arnold Armstrong.

Gertrude lifted her head at last and stared across the table at Halsey.

“Why did he do it?” she wailed. “Couldn’t you stop him, Halsey? It was
suicidal to go back!”

Halsey was looking steadily through the windows of the breakfast-room,
but it was evident he saw nothing.

“It was the only thing he could do, Trude,” he said at last. “Aunt Ray,
when I found Jack at the Greenwood Club last Saturday night, he was
frantic. I can not talk until Jack tells me I may, but—he is absolutely
innocent of all this, believe me. I thought, Trude and I thought, we
were helping him, but it was the wrong way. He came back. Isn’t that
the act of an innocent man?”

“Then why did he leave at all?” I asked, unconvinced. “What innocent
man would run away from here at three o’clock in the morning? Doesn’t
it look rather as though he thought it impossible to escape?”

Gertrude rose angrily. “You are not even just!” she flamed. “You don’t
know anything about it, and you condemn him!”

“I know that we have all lost a great deal of money,” I said. “I shall
believe Mr. Bailey innocent the moment he is shown to be. You profess
to know the truth, but you can not tell me! What am I to think?”

Halsey leaned over and patted my hand.

“You must take us on faith,” he said. “Jack Bailey hasn’t a penny that
doesn’t belong to him; the guilty man will be known in a day or so.”

“I shall believe that when it is proved,” I said grimly. “In the
meantime, I take no one on faith. The Inneses never do.”

Gertrude, who had been standing aloof at a window, turned suddenly.
“But when the bonds are offered for sale, Halsey, won’t the thief be
detected at once?”

Halsey turned with a superior smile.

“It wouldn’t be done that way,” he said. “They would be taken out of
the vault by some one who had access to it, and used as collateral for
a loan in another bank. It would be possible to realize eighty per
cent. of their face value.”

“In cash?”

“In cash.”

“But the man who did it—he would be known?”

“Yes. I tell you both, as sure as I stand here, I believe that Paul
Armstrong looted his own bank. I believe he has a million at least, as
the result, and that he will never come back. I’m worse than a pauper
now. I can’t ask Louise to share nothing a year with me and when I
think of this disgrace for her, I’m crazy.”

The most ordinary events of life seemed pregnant with possibilities
that day, and when Halsey was called to the telephone, I ceased all
pretense at eating. When he came back from the telephone his face
showed that something had occurred. He waited, however, until Thomas
left the dining-room: then he told us.

“Paul Armstrong is dead,” he announced gravely. “He died this morning
in California. Whatever he did, he is beyond the law now.”

Gertrude turned pale.

“And the only man who could have cleared Jack can never do it!” she
said despairingly.

“Also,” I replied coldly, “Mr. Armstrong is for ever beyond the power
of defending himself. When your Jack comes to me, with some two hundred
thousand dollars in his hands, which is about what you have lost, I
shall believe him innocent.”

Halsey threw his cigarette away and turned on me.

“There you go!” he exclaimed. “If he was the thief, he could return the
money, of course. If he is innocent, he probably hasn’t a tenth of that
amount in the world. In his hands! That’s like a woman.”

Gertrude, who had been pale and despairing during the early part of the
conversation, had flushed an indignant red. She got up and drew herself
to her slender height, looking down at me with the scorn of the young
and positive.

“You are the only mother I ever had,” she said tensely. “I have given
you all I would have given my mother, had she lived—my love, my trust.
And now, when I need you most, you fail me. I tell you, John Bailey is
a good man, an honest man. If you say he is not, you—you—”

“Gertrude,” Halsey broke in sharply. She dropped beside the table and,
burying her face in her arms broke into a storm of tears.

“I love him—love him,” she sobbed, in a surrender that was totally
unlike her. “Oh, I never thought it would be like this. I can’t bear
it. I can’t.”

Halsey and I stood helpless before the storm. I would have tried to
comfort her, but she had put me away, and there was something aloof in
her grief, something new and strange. At last, when her sorrow had
subsided to the dry shaking sobs of a tired child, without raising her
head she put out one groping hand.

“Aunt Ray!” she whispered. In a moment I was on my knees beside her,
her arm around my neck, her cheek against my hair.

“Where am I in this?” Halsey said suddenly and tried to put his arms
around us both. It was a welcome distraction, and Gertrude was soon
herself again. The little storm had cleared the air. Nevertheless, my
opinion remained unchanged. There was much to be cleared up before I
would consent to any renewal of my acquaintance with John Bailey. And
Halsey and Gertrude knew it, knowing me.




CHAPTER XI.
HALSEY MAKES A CAPTURE


It was about half-past eight when we left the dining-room, and still
engrossed with one subject, the failure of the bank and its attendant
evils, Halsey and I went out into the grounds for a stroll. Gertrude
followed us shortly. “The light was thickening,” to appropriate
Shakespeare’s description of twilight, and once again the tree-toads
and the crickets were making night throb with their tiny life. It was
almost oppressively lonely, in spite of its beauty, and I felt a
sickening pang of homesickness for my city at night—for the clatter of
horses’ feet on cemented paving, for the lights, the voices, the sound
of children playing. The country after dark oppresses me. The stars,
quite eclipsed in the city by the electric lights, here become
insistent, assertive. Whether I want to or not, I find myself looking
for the few I know by name, and feeling ridiculously new and small by
contrast—always an unpleasant sensation.

After Gertrude joined us, we avoided any further mention of the murder.
To Halsey, as to me, there was ever present, I am sure, the thought of
our conversation of the night before. As we strolled back and forth
along the drive, Mr. Jamieson emerged from the shadow of the trees.

“Good evening,” he said, managing to include Gertrude in his bow.

Gertrude had never been even ordinarily courteous to him, and she
nodded coldly. Halsey, however, was more cordial, although we were all
constrained enough. He and Gertrude went on together, leaving the
detective to walk with me. As soon as they were out of earshot, he
turned to me.

“Do you know, Miss Innes,” he said, “the deeper I go into this thing,
the more strange it seems to me. I am very sorry for Miss Gertrude. It
looks as if Bailey, whom she has tried so hard to save, is worse than a
rascal; and after her plucky fight for him, it seems hard.”

I looked through the dusk to where Gertrude’s light dinner dress
gleamed among the trees. She HAD made a plucky fight, poor child.
Whatever she might have been driven to do, I could find nothing but a
deep sympathy for her. If she had only come to me with the whole truth
then!

“Miss Innes,” Mr. Jamieson was saying, “in the last three days, have
you seen a—any suspicious figures around the grounds? Any—woman?”

“No,” I replied. “I have a houseful of maids that will bear watching,
one and all. But there has been no strange woman near the house or
Liddy would have seen her, you may be sure. She has a telescopic eye.”

Mr. Jamieson looked thoughtful.

“It may not amount to anything,” he said slowly. “It is difficult to
get any perspective on things around here, because every one down in
the village is sure he saw the murderer, either before or since the
crime. And half of them will stretch a point or two as to facts, to be
obliging. But the man who drives the hack down there tells a story that
may possibly prove to be important.”

“I have heard it, I think. Was it the one the parlor maid brought up
yesterday, about a ghost wringing its hands on the roof? Or perhaps
it’s the one the milk-boy heard: a tramp washing a dirty shirt,
presumably bloody, in the creek below the bridge?”

I could see the gleam of Mr. Jamieson’s teeth, as he smiled.

“Neither,” he said. “But Matthew Geist, which is our friend’s name,
claims that on Saturday night, at nine-thirty, a veiled lady—”

“I knew it would be a veiled lady,” I broke in.

“A veiled lady,” he persisted, “who was apparently young and beautiful,
engaged his hack and asked to be driven to Sunnyside. Near the gate,
however, she made him stop, in spite of his remonstrances, saying she
preferred to walk to the house. She paid him, and he left her there.
Now, Miss Innes, you had no such visitor, I believe?”

“None,” I said decidedly.

“Geist thought it might be a maid, as you had got a supply that day.
But he said her getting out near the gate puzzled him. Anyhow, we have
now one veiled lady, who, with the ghostly intruder of Friday night,
makes two assets that I hardly know what to do with.”

“It is mystifying,” I admitted, “although I can think of one possible
explanation. The path from the Greenwood Club to the village enters the
road near the lodge gate. A woman who wished to reach the Country Club,
unperceived, might choose such a method. There are plenty of women
there.”

I think this gave him something to ponder, for in a short time he said
good night and left. But I myself was far from satisfied. I was
determined, however, on one thing. If my suspicions—for I had
suspicions—were true, I would make my own investigations, and Mr.
Jamieson should learn only what was good for him to know.

We went back to the house, and Gertrude, who was more like herself
since her talk with Halsey, sat down at the mahogany desk in the
living-room to write a letter. Halsey prowled up and down the entire
east wing, now in the card-room, now in the billiard-room, and now and
then blowing his clouds of tobacco smoke among the pink and gold
hangings of the drawing-room. After a little I joined him in the
billiard-room, and together we went over the details of the discovery
of the body.

The card-room was quite dark. Where we sat, in the billiard-room, only
one of the side brackets was lighted, and we spoke in subdued tones, as
the hour and the subject seemed to demand. When I spoke of the figure
Liddy and I had seen on the porch through the card-room window Friday
night, Halsey sauntered into the darkened room, and together we stood
there, much as Liddy and I had done that other night.

The window was the same grayish rectangle in the blackness as before. A
few feet away in the hall was the spot where the body of Arnold
Armstrong had been found. I was a bit nervous, and I put my hand on
Halsey’s sleeve. Suddenly, from the top of the staircase above us came
the sound of a cautious footstep. At first I was not sure, but Halsey’s
attitude told me he had heard and was listening. The step, slow,
measured, infinitely cautious, was nearer now. Halsey tried to loosen
my fingers, but I was in a paralysis of fright.

The swish of a body against the curving rail, as if for guidance, was
plain enough, and now whoever it was had reached the foot of the
staircase and had caught a glimpse of our rigid silhouettes against the
billiard-room doorway. Halsey threw me off then and strode forward.

“Who is it?” he called imperiously, and took a half dozen rapid strides
toward the foot of the staircase. Then I heard him mutter something;
there was the crash of a falling body, the slam of the outer door, and,
for an instant, quiet. I screamed, I think. Then I remember turning on
the lights and finding Halsey, white with fury, trying to untangle
himself from something warm and fleecy. He had cut his forehead a
little on the lowest step of the stairs, and he was rather a ghastly
sight.

He flung the white object at me, and, jerking open the outer door,
raced into the darkness.

Gertrude had come on hearing the noise, and now we stood, staring at
each other over—of all things on earth—a white silk and wool blanket,
exquisitely fine! It was the most unghostly thing in the world, with
its lavender border and its faint scent. Gertrude was the first to
speak.

“Somebody—had it?” she asked.

“Yes. Halsey tried to stop whoever it was and fell. Gertrude, that
blanket is not mine. I have never seen it before.”

She held it up and looked at it: then she went to the door on to the
veranda and threw it open. Perhaps a hundred feet from the house were
two figures, that moved slowly toward us as we looked.

When they came within range of the light, I recognized Halsey, and with
him Mrs. Watson, the housekeeper.




CHAPTER XII.
ONE MYSTERY FOR ANOTHER


The most commonplace incident takes on a new appearance if the
attendant circumstances are unusual. There was no reason on earth why
Mrs. Watson should not have carried a blanket down the east wing
staircase, if she so desired. But to take a blanket down at eleven
o’clock at night, with every precaution as to noise, and, when
discovered, to fling it at Halsey and bolt—Halsey’s word, and a good
one—into the grounds,—this made the incident more than significant.

They moved slowly across the lawn and up the steps. Halsey was talking
quietly, and Mrs. Watson was looking down and listening. She was a
woman of a certain amount of dignity, most efficient, so far as I could
see, although Liddy would have found fault if she dared. But just now
Mrs. Watson’s face was an enigma. She was defiant, I think, under her
mask of submission, and she still showed the effect of nervous shock.

“Mrs. Watson,” I said severely, “will you be so good as to explain this
rather unusual occurrence?”

“I don’t think it so unusual, Miss Innes.” Her voice was deep and very
clear: just now it was somewhat tremulous. “I was taking a blanket down
to Thomas, who is—not well to-night, and I used this staircase, as
being nearer the path to the lodge. When—Mr. Innes called and then
rushed at me, I—I was alarmed, and flung the blanket at him.”

Halsey was examining the cut on his forehead in a small mirror on the
wall. It was not much of an injury, but it had bled freely, and his
appearance was rather terrifying.

“Thomas ill?” he said, over his shoulder. “Why, _I_ thought I saw
Thomas out there as you made that cyclonic break out of the door and
over the porch.”

I could see that under pretense of examining his injury he was watching
her through the mirror.

“Is this one of the servants’ blankets, Mrs. Watson?” I asked, holding
up its luxurious folds to the light.

“Everything else is locked away,” she replied. Which was true enough,
no doubt. I had rented the house without bed furnishings.

“If Thomas is ill,” Halsey said, “some member of the family ought to go
down to see him. You needn’t bother, Mrs. Watson. I will take the
blanket.”

She drew herself up quickly, as if in protest, but she found nothing to
say. She stood smoothing the folds of her dead black dress, her face as
white as chalk above it. Then she seemed to make up her mind.

“Very well, Mr. Innes,” she said. “Perhaps you would better go. I have
done all I could.”

And then she turned and went up the circular staircase, moving slowly
and with a certain dignity. Below, the three of us stared at one
another across the intervening white blanket.

“Upon my word,” Halsey broke out, “this place is a walking nightmare. I
have the feeling that we three outsiders who have paid our money for
the privilege of staying in this spook-factory, are living on the very
top of things. We’re on the lid, so to speak. Now and then we get a
sight of the things inside, but we are not a part of them.”

“Do you suppose,” Gertrude asked doubtfully, “that she really meant
that blanket for Thomas?”

“Thomas was standing beside that magnolia tree,” Halsey replied, “when
I ran after Mrs. Watson. It’s down to this, Aunt Ray. Rosie’s basket
and Mrs. Watson’s blanket can only mean one thing: there is somebody
hiding or being hidden in the lodge. It wouldn’t surprise me if we hold
the key to the whole situation now. Anyhow, I’m going to the lodge to
investigate.”

Gertrude wanted to go, too, but she looked so shaken that I insisted
she should not. I sent for Liddy to help her to bed, and then Halsey
and I started for the lodge. The grass was heavy with dew, and,
man-like, Halsey chose the shortest way across the lawn. Half-way,
however, he stopped.

“We’d better go by the drive,” he said. “This isn’t a lawn; it’s a
field. Where’s the gardener these days?”

“There isn’t any,” I said meekly. “We have been thankful enough, so
far, to have our meals prepared and served and the beds aired. The
gardener who belongs here is working at the club.”

“Remind me to-morrow to send out a man from town,” he said. “I know the
very fellow.”

I record this scrap of conversation, just as I have tried to put down
anything and everything that had a bearing on what followed, because
the gardener Halsey sent the next day played an important part in the
events of the next few weeks—events that culminated, as you know, by
stirring the country profoundly. At that time, however, I was busy
trying to keep my skirts dry, and paid little or no attention to what
seemed then a most trivial remark.

Along the drive I showed Halsey where I had found Rosie’s basket with
the bits of broken china piled inside. He was rather skeptical.

“Warner probably,” he said when I had finished. “Began it as a joke on
Rosie, and ended by picking up the broken china out of the road,
knowing it would play hob with the tires of the car.” Which shows how
near one can come to the truth, and yet miss it altogether.

At the lodge everything was quiet. There was a light in the
sitting-room down-stairs, and a faint gleam, as if from a shaded lamp,
in one of the upper rooms. Halsey stopped and examined the lodge with
calculating eyes.

“I don’t know, Aunt Ray,” he said dubiously; “this is hardly a woman’s
affair. If there’s a scrap of any kind, you hike for the timber.” Which
was Halsey’s solicitous care for me, put into vernacular.

“I shall stay right here,” I said, and crossing the small veranda, now
shaded and fragrant with honeysuckle, I hammered the knocker on the
door.

Thomas opened the door himself—Thomas, fully dressed and in his
customary health. I had the blanket over my arm.

“I brought the blanket, Thomas,” I said; “I am sorry you are so ill.”

The old man stood staring at me and then at the blanket. His confusion
under other circumstances would have been ludicrous.

“What! Not ill?” Halsey said from the step. “Thomas, I’m afraid you’ve
been malingering.”

Thomas seemed to have been debating something with himself. Now he
stepped out on the porch and closed the door gently behind him.

“I reckon you bettah come in, Mis’ Innes,” he said, speaking
cautiously. “It’s got so I dunno what to do, and it’s boun’ to come out
some time er ruther.”

He threw the door open then, and I stepped inside, Halsey close behind.
In the sitting-room the old negro turned with quiet dignity to Halsey.

“You bettah sit down, sah,” he said. “It’s a place for a woman, sah.”

Things were not turning out the way Halsey expected. He sat down on the
center-table, with his hands thrust in his pockets, and watched me as I
followed Thomas up the narrow stairs. At the top a woman was standing,
and a second glance showed me it was Rosie.

She shrank back a little, but I said nothing. And then Thomas motioned
to a partly open door, and I went in.

The lodge boasted three bedrooms up-stairs, all comfortably furnished.
In this one, the largest and airiest, a night lamp was burning, and by
its light I could make out a plain white metal bed. A girl was asleep
there—or in a half stupor, for she muttered something now and then.
Rosie had taken her courage in her hands, and coming in had turned up
the light. It was only then that I knew. Fever-flushed, ill as she was,
I recognized Louise Armstrong.

I stood gazing down at her in a stupor of amazement. Louise here,
hiding at the lodge, ill and alone! Rosie came up to the bed and
smoothed the white counterpane.

“I am afraid she is worse to-night,” she ventured at last. I put my
hand on the sick girl’s forehead. It was burning with fever, and I
turned to where Thomas lingered in the hallway.

“Will you tell me what you mean, Thomas Johnson, by not telling me this
before?” I demanded indignantly.

Thomas quailed.

“Mis’ Louise wouldn’ let me,” he said earnestly. “I wanted to. She
ought to ’a’ had a doctor the night she came, but she wouldn’ hear to
it. Is she—is she very bad, Mis’ Innes?”

“Bad enough,” I said coldly. “Send Mr. Innes up.”

Halsey came up the stairs slowly, looking rather interested and
inclined to be amused. For a moment he could not see anything
distinctly in the darkened room; he stopped, glanced at Rosie and at
me, and then his eyes fell on the restless head on the pillow.

I think he felt who it was before he really saw her; he crossed the
room in a couple of strides and bent over the bed.

“Louise!” he said softly; but she did not reply, and her eyes showed no
recognition. Halsey was young, and illness was new to him. He
straightened himself slowly, still watching her, and caught my arm.

“She’s dying, Aunt Ray!” he said huskily. “Dying! Why, she doesn’t know
me!”

“Fudge!” I snapped, being apt to grow irritable when my sympathies are
aroused. “She’s doing nothing of the sort,—and don’t pinch my arm. If
you want something to do, go and choke Thomas.”

But at that moment Louise roused from her stupor to cough, and at the
end of the paroxysm, as Rosie laid her back, exhausted, she knew us.
That was all Halsey wanted; to him consciousness was recovery. He
dropped on his knees beside the bed, and tried to tell her she was all
right, and we would bring her around in a hurry, and how beautiful she
looked—only to break down utterly and have to stop. And at that I came
to my senses, and put him out.

“This instant!” I ordered, as he hesitated. “And send Rosie here.”

He did not go far. He sat on the top step of the stairs, only leaving
to telephone for a doctor, and getting in everybody’s way in his
eagerness to fetch and carry. I got him away finally, by sending him to
fix up the car as a sort of ambulance, in case the doctor would allow
the sick girl to be moved. He sent Gertrude down to the lodge loaded
with all manner of impossible things, including an armful of Turkish
towels and a box of mustard plasters, and as the two girls had known
each other somewhat before, Louise brightened perceptibly when she saw
her.

When the doctor from Englewood—the Casanova doctor, Doctor Walker,
being away—had started for Sunnyside, and I had got Thomas to stop
trying to explain what he did not understand himself, I had a long talk
with the old man, and this is what I learned.

On Saturday evening before, about ten o’clock, he had been reading in
the sitting-room down-stairs, when some one rapped at the door. The old
man was alone, Warner not having arrived, and at first he was uncertain
about opening the door. He did so finally, and was amazed at being
confronted by Louise Armstrong. Thomas was an old family servant,
having been with the present Mrs. Armstrong since she was a child, and
he was overwhelmed at seeing Louise. He saw that she was excited and
tired, and he drew her into the sitting-room and made her sit down.
After a while he went to the house and brought Mrs. Watson, and they
talked until late. The old man said Louise was in trouble, and seemed
frightened. Mrs. Watson made some tea and took it to the lodge, but
Louise made them both promise to keep her presence a secret. She had
not known that Sunnyside was rented, and whatever her trouble was, this
complicated things. She seemed puzzled. Her stepfather and her mother
were still in California—that was all she would say about them. Why she
had run away no one could imagine. Mr. Arnold Armstrong was at the
Greenwood Club, and at last Thomas, not knowing what else to do, went
over there along the path. It was almost midnight. Part-way over he met
Armstrong himself and brought him to the lodge. Mrs. Watson had gone to
the house for some bed-linen, it having been arranged that under the
circumstances Louise would be better at the lodge until morning. Arnold
Armstrong and Louise had a long conference, during which he was heard
to storm and become very violent. When he left it was after two. He had
gone up to the house—Thomas did not know why—and at three o’clock he
was shot at the foot of the circular staircase.

The following morning Louise had been ill. She had asked for Arnold,
and was told he had left town. Thomas had not the moral courage to tell
her of the crime. She refused a doctor, and shrank morbidly from having
her presence known. Mrs. Watson and Thomas had had their hands full,
and at last Rosie had been enlisted to help them. She carried necessary
provisions—little enough—to the lodge, and helped to keep the secret.

Thomas told me quite frankly that he had been anxious to keep Louise’s
presence hidden for this reason: they had all seen Arnold Armstrong
that night, and he, himself, for one, was known to have had no very
friendly feeling for the dead man. As to the reason for Louise’s flight
from California, or why she had not gone to the Fitzhughs’, or to some
of her people in town, he had no more information than I had. With the
death of her stepfather and the prospect of the immediate return of the
family, things had become more and more impossible. I gathered that
Thomas was as relieved as I at the turn events had taken. No, she did
not know of either of the deaths in the family.

Taken all around, I had only substituted one mystery for another.

If I knew now why Rosie had taken the basket of dishes, I did not know
who had spoken to her and followed her along the drive. If I knew that
Louise was in the lodge, I did not know why she was there. If I knew
that Arnold Armstrong had spent some time in the lodge the night before
he was murdered, I was no nearer the solution of the crime. Who was the
midnight intruder who had so alarmed Liddy and myself? Who had fallen
down the clothes chute? Was Gertrude’s lover a villain or a victim?
Time was to answer all these things.




CHAPTER XIII.
LOUISE


The doctor from Englewood came very soon, and I went up to see the sick
girl with him. Halsey had gone to supervise the fitting of the car with
blankets and pillows, and Gertrude was opening and airing Louise’s own
rooms at the house. Her private sitting-room, bedroom and dressing-room
were as they had been when we came. They occupied the end of the east
wing, beyond the circular staircase, and we had not even opened them.

The girl herself was too ill to notice what was being done. When, with
the help of the doctor, who was a fatherly man with a family of girls
at home, we got her to the house and up the stairs into bed, she
dropped into a feverish sleep, which lasted until morning. Doctor
Stewart—that was the Englewood doctor—stayed almost all night, giving
the medicine himself, and watching her closely. Afterward he told me
that she had had a narrow escape from pneumonia, and that the cerebral
symptoms had been rather alarming. I said I was glad it wasn’t an
“itis” of some kind, anyhow, and he smiled solemnly.

He left after breakfast, saying that he thought the worst of the danger
was over, and that she must be kept very quiet.

“The shock of two deaths, I suppose, has done this,” he remarked,
picking up his case. “It has been very deplorable.”

I hastened to set him right.

“She does not know of either, Doctor,” I said. “Please do not mention
them to her.”

He looked as surprised as a medical man ever does.

“I do not know the family,” he said, preparing to get into his top
buggy. “Young Walker, down in Casanova, has been attending them. I
understand he is going to marry this young lady.”

“You have been misinformed,” I said stiffly. “Miss Armstrong is going
to marry my nephew.”

The doctor smiled as he picked up the reins.

“Young ladies are changeable these days,” he said. “We thought the
wedding was to occur soon. Well, I will stop in this afternoon to see
how my patient is getting along.”

He drove away then, and I stood looking after him. He was a doctor of
the old school, of the class of family practitioner that is fast dying
out; a loyal and honorable gentleman who was at once physician and
confidential adviser to his patients. When I was a girl we called in
the doctor alike when we had measles, or when mother’s sister died in
the far West. He cut out redundant tonsils and brought the babies with
the same air of inspiring self-confidence. Nowadays it requires a
different specialist for each of these occurrences. When the babies
cried, old Doctor Wainwright gave them peppermint and dropped warm
sweet oil in their ears with sublime faith that if it was not colic it
was earache. When, at the end of a year, father met him driving in his
high side-bar buggy with the white mare ambling along, and asked for a
bill, the doctor used to go home, estimate what his services were worth
for that period, divide it in half—I don’t think he kept any books—and
send father a statement, in a cramped hand, on a sheet of ruled white
paper. He was an honored guest at all the weddings, christenings, and
funerals—yes, funerals—for every one knew he had done his best, and
there was no gainsaying the ways of Providence.

Ah, well, Doctor Wainwright is gone, and I am an elderly woman with an
increasing tendency to live in the past. The contrast between my old
doctor at home and the Casanova doctor, Frank Walker, always rouses me
to wrath and digression.

Some time about noon of that day, Wednesday, Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh
telephoned me. I have the barest acquaintance with her—she managed to
be put on the governing board of the Old Ladies’ Home and ruins their
digestions by sending them ice-cream and cake on every holiday. Beyond
that, and her reputation at bridge, which is insufferably bad—she is
the worst player at the bridge club—I know little of her. It was she
who had taken charge of Arnold Armstrong’s funeral, however, and I went
at once to the telephone.

“Yes,” I said, “this is Miss Innes.”

“Miss Innes,” she said volubly, “I have just received a very strange
telegram from my cousin, Mrs. Armstrong. Her husband died yesterday, in
California and—wait, I will read you the message.”

I knew what was coming, and I made up my mind at once. If Louise
Armstrong had a good and sufficient reason for leaving her people and
coming home, a reason, moreover, that kept her from going at once to
Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh, and that brought her to the lodge at Sunnyside
instead, it was not my intention to betray her. Louise herself must
notify her people. I do not justify myself now, but remember, I was in
a peculiar position toward the Armstrong family. I was connected most
unpleasantly with a cold-blooded crime, and my niece and nephew were
practically beggared, either directly or indirectly, through the head
of the family.

Mrs. Fitzhugh had found the message.

“‘Paul died yesterday. Heart disease,’” she read. “‘Wire at once if
Louise is with you.’ You see, Miss Innes, Louise must have started
east, and Fanny is alarmed about her.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Louise is not here,” Mrs. Fitzhugh went on, “and none of her
friends—the few who are still in town—has seen her. I called you
because Sunnyside was not rented when she went away, and Louise might
have, gone there.”

“I am sorry, Mrs. Fitzhugh, but I can not help you,” I said, and was
immediately filled with compunction. Suppose Louise grew worse? Who was
I to play Providence in this case? The anxious mother certainly had a
right to know that her daughter was in good hands. So I broke in on
Mrs. Fitzhugh’s voluble excuses for disturbing me.

“Mrs. Fitzhugh,” I said. “I was going to let you think I knew nothing
about Louise Armstrong, but I have changed my mind. Louise is here,
with me.” There was a clatter of ejaculations at the other end of the
wire. “She is ill, and not able to be moved. Moreover, she is unable to
see any one. I wish you would wire her mother that she is with me, and
tell her not to worry. No, I do not know why she came east.”

“But my dear Miss Innes!” Mrs. Fitzhugh began. I cut in ruthlessly.

“I will send for you as soon as she can see you,” I said. “No, she is
not in a critical state now, but the doctor says she must have absolute
quiet.”

When I had hung up the receiver, I sat down to think. So Louise had
fled from her people in California, and had come east alone! It was not
a new idea, but why had she done it? It occurred to me that Doctor
Walker might be concerned in it, might possibly have bothered her with
unwelcome attentions; but it seemed to me that Louise was hardly a girl
to take refuge in flight under such circumstances. She had always been
high-spirited, with the well-poised head and buoyant step of the
outdoors girl. It must have been much more in keeping with Louise’s
character, as I knew it, to resent vigorously any unwelcome attentions
from Doctor Walker. It was the suitor whom I should have expected to
see in headlong flight, not the lady in the case.

The puzzle was no clearer at the end of the half-hour. I picked up the
morning papers, which were still full of the looting of the Traders’
Bank, the interest at fever height again, on account of Paul
Armstrong’s death. The bank examiners were working on the books, and
said nothing for publication: John Bailey had been released on bond.
The body of Paul Armstrong would arrive Sunday and would be buried from
the Armstrong town house. There were rumors that the dead man’s estate
had been a comparatively small one. The last paragraph was the
important one.

Walter P. Broadhurst, of the Marine Bank, had produced two hundred
American Traction bonds, which had been placed as security with the
Marine Bank for a loan of one hundred and sixty thousand dollars, made
to Paul Armstrong, just before his California trip. The bonds were a
part of the missing traction bonds from the Traders’ Bank! While this
involved the late president of the wrecked bank, to my mind it by no
means cleared its cashier.

The gardener mentioned by Halsey came out about two o’clock in the
afternoon, and walked up from the station. I was favorably impressed by
him. His references were good—he had been employed by the Brays’ until
they went to Europe, and he looked young and vigorous. He asked for one
assistant, and I was glad enough to get off so easily. He was a
pleasant-faced young fellow, with black hair and blue eyes, and his
name was Alexander Graham. I have been particular about Alex, because,
as I said before, he played an important part later.

That afternoon I had a new insight into the character of the dead
banker. I had my first conversation with Louise. She sent for me, and
against my better judgment I went. There were so many things she could
not be told, in her weakened condition, that I dreaded the interview.
It was much easier than I expected, however, because she asked no
questions.

Gertrude had gone to bed, having been up almost all night, and Halsey
was absent on one of those mysterious absences of his that grew more
and more frequent as time went on, until it culminated in the event of
the night of June the tenth. Liddy was in attendance in the sick-room.
There being little or nothing to do, she seemed to spend her time
smoothing the wrinkles from the counterpane. Louise lay under a field
of virgin white, folded back at an angle of geometrical exactness, and
necessitating a readjustment every time the sick girl turned.

Liddy heard my approach and came out to meet me. She seemed to be in a
perpetual state of goose-flesh, and she had got in the habit of looking
past me when she talked, as if she saw things. It had the effect of
making me look over my shoulder to see what she was staring at, and was
intensely irritating.

“She’s awake,” Liddy said, looking uneasily down the circular
staircase, which was beside me. “She was talkin’ in her sleep something
awful—about dead men and coffins.”

“Liddy,” I said sternly, “did you breathe a word about everything not
being right here?”

Liddy’s gaze had wandered to the door of the chute, now bolted
securely.

“Not a word,” she said, “beyond asking her a question or two, which
there was no harm in. She says there never was a ghost known here.”

I glared at her, speechless, and closing the door into Louise’s
boudoir, to Liddy’s great disappointment, I went on to the bedroom
beyond.

Whatever Paul Armstrong had been, he had been lavish with his
stepdaughter. Gertrude’s rooms at home were always beautiful
apartments, but the three rooms in the east wing at Sunnyside, set
apart for the daughter of the house, were much more splendid.

From the walls to the rugs on the floor, from the furniture to the
appointments of the bath, with its pool sunk in the floor instead of
the customary unlovely tub, everything was luxurious. In the bedroom
Louise was watching for me. It was easy to see that she was much
improved; the flush was going, and the peculiar gasping breathing of
the night before was now a comfortable and easy respiration.

She held out her hand and I took it between both of mine.

“What can I say to you, Miss Innes?” she said slowly. “To have come
like this—”

I thought she was going to break down, but she did not.

“You are not to think of anything but of getting well,” I said, patting
her hand. “When you are better, I am going to scold you for not coming
here at once. This is your home, my dear, and of all people in the
world, Halsey’s old aunt ought to make you welcome.”

She smiled a little, sadly, I thought.

“I ought not to see Halsey,” she said. “Miss Innes, there are a great
many things you will never understand, I am afraid. I am an impostor on
your sympathy, because I—I stay here and let you lavish care on me, and
all the time I know you are going to despise me.”

“Nonsense!” I said briskly. “Why, what would Halsey do to me if I even
ventured such a thing? He is so big and masterful that if I dared to be
anything but rapturous over you, he would throw me out of a window.
Indeed, he would be quite capable of it.”

She seemed scarcely to hear my facetious tone. She had eloquent brown
eyes—the Inneses are fair, and are prone to a grayish-green optic that
is better for use than appearance—and they seemed now to be clouded
with trouble.

“Poor Halsey!” she said softly. “Miss Innes, I can not marry him, and I
am afraid to tell him. I am a coward—a coward!”

I sat beside the bed and stared at her. She was too ill to argue with,
and, besides, sick people take queer fancies.

“We will talk about that when you are stronger,” I said gently.

“But there are some things I must tell you,” she insisted. “You must
wonder how I came here, and why I stayed hidden at the lodge. Dear old
Thomas has been almost crazy, Miss Innes. I did not know that Sunnyside
was rented. I knew my mother wished to rent it, without telling
my—stepfather, but the news must have reached her after I left. When I
started east, I had only one idea—to be alone with my thoughts for a
time, to bury myself here. Then, I—must have taken a cold on the
train.”

“You came east in clothing suitable for California,” I said, “and, like
all young girls nowadays, I don’t suppose you wear flannels.” But she
was not listening.

“Miss Innes,” she said, “has my stepbrother Arnold gone away?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, startled. But Louise was literal.

“He didn’t come back that night,” she said, “and it was so important
that I should see him.”

“I believe he has gone away,” I replied uncertainly. “Isn’t it
something that we could attend to instead?”

But she shook her head. “I must do it myself,” she said dully. “My
mother must have rented Sunnyside without telling my stepfather,
and—Miss Innes, did you ever hear of any one being wretchedly poor in
the midst of luxury?

“Did you ever long, and long, for money—money to use without question,
money that no one would take you to task about? My mother and I have
been surrounded for years with every indulgence—everything that would
make a display. But we have never had any money, Miss Innes; that must
have been why mother rented this house. My stepfather pays our bills.
It’s the most maddening, humiliating existence in the world. I would
love honest poverty better.”

“Never mind,” I said; “when you and Halsey are married you can be as
honest as you like, and you will certainly be poor.”

Halsey came to the door at that moment and I could hear him coaxing
Liddy for admission to the sick room.

“Shall I bring him in?” I asked Louise, uncertain what to do. The girl
seemed to shrink back among her pillows at the sound of his voice. I
was vaguely irritated with her; there are few young fellows like
Halsey—straightforward, honest, and willing to sacrifice everything for
the one woman. I knew one once, more than thirty years ago, who was
like that: he died a long time ago. And sometimes I take out his
picture, with its cane and its queer silk hat, and look at it. But of
late years it has grown too painful: he is always a boy—and I am an old
woman. I would not bring him back if I could.

Perhaps it was some such memory that made me call out sharply.

“Come in, Halsey.” And then I took my sewing and went into the boudoir
beyond, to play propriety. I did not try to hear what they said, but
every word came through the open door with curious distinctness. Halsey
had evidently gone over to the bed and I suppose he kissed her. There
was silence for a moment, as if words were superfluous things.

“I have been almost wild, sweetheart,”—Halsey’s voice. “Why didn’t you
trust me, and send for me before?”

“It was because I couldn’t trust myself,” she said in a low tone. “I am
too weak to struggle to-day; oh, Halsey, how I have wanted to see you!”

There was something I did not hear, then Halsey again.

“We could go away,” he was saying. “What does it matter about any one
in the world but just the two of us? To be always together, like this,
hand in hand; Louise—don’t tell me it isn’t going to be. I won’t
believe you.”

“You don’t know; you don’t know,” Louise repeated dully. “Halsey, I
care—you know that—but—not enough to marry you.”

“That is not true, Louise,” he said sternly. “You can not look at me
with your honest eyes and say that.”

“I can not marry you,” she repeated miserably. “It’s bad enough, isn’t
it? Don’t make it worse. Some day, before long, you will be glad.”

“Then it is because you have never loved me.” There were depths of hurt
pride in his voice. “You saw how much I loved you, and you let me think
you cared—for a while. No—that isn’t like you, Louise. There is
something you haven’t told me. Is it—because there is some one else?”

“Yes,” almost inaudibly.

“Louise! Oh, I don’t believe it.”

“It is true,” she said sadly. “Halsey, you must not try to see me
again. As soon as I can, I am going away from here—where you are all so
much kinder than I deserve. And whatever you hear about me, try to
think as well of me as you can. I am going to marry—another man. How
you must hate me—hate me!”

I could hear Halsey cross the room to the window. Then, after a pause,
he went back to her again. I could hardly sit still; I wanted to go in
and give her a good shaking.

“Then it’s all over,” he was saying with a long breath. “The plans we
made together, the hopes, the—all of it—over! Well, I’ll not be a baby,
and I’ll give you up the minute you say ‘I don’t love you and I do
love—some one else’!”

“I can not say that,” she breathed, “but, very soon, I shall marry—the
other man.”

I could hear Halsey’s low triumphant laugh.

“I defy him,” he said. “Sweetheart, as long as you care for me, I am
not afraid.”

The wind slammed the door between the two rooms just then, and I could
hear nothing more, although I moved my chair quite close. After a
discreet interval, I went into the other room, and found Louise alone.
She was staring with sad eyes at the cherub painted on the ceiling over
the bed, and because she looked tired I did not disturb her.




CHAPTER XIV.
AN EGG-NOG AND A TELEGRAM


We had discovered Louise at the lodge Tuesday night. It was Wednesday I
had my interview with her. Thursday and Friday were uneventful, save as
they marked improvement in our patient. Gertrude spent almost all the
time with her, and the two had grown to be great friends. But certain
things hung over me constantly; the coroner’s inquest on the death of
Arnold Armstrong, to be held Saturday, and the arrival of Mrs.
Armstrong and young Doctor Walker, bringing the body of the dead
president of the Traders’ Bank. We had not told Louise of either death.

Then, too, I was anxious about the children. With their mother’s
inheritance swept away in the wreck of the bank, and with their love
affairs in a disastrous condition, things could scarcely be worse.
Added to that, the cook and Liddy had a flare-up over the proper way to
make beef-tea for Louise, and, of course, the cook left.

Mrs. Watson had been glad enough, I think, to turn Louise over to our
care, and Thomas went upstairs night and morning to greet his young
mistress from the doorway. Poor Thomas! He had the faculty—found still
in some old negroes, who cling to the traditions of slavery days—of
making his employer’s interest his. It was always “we” with Thomas; I
miss him sorely; pipe-smoking, obsequious, not over reliable, kindly
old man!

On Thursday Mr. Harton, the Armstrongs’ legal adviser, called up from
town. He had been advised, he said, that Mrs. Armstrong was coming east
with her husband’s body and would arrive Monday. He came with some
hesitation, he went on, to the fact that he had been further instructed
to ask me to relinquish my lease on Sunnyside, as it was Mrs.
Armstrong’s desire to come directly there.

I was aghast.

“Here!” I said. “Surely you are mistaken, Mr. Harton. I should think,
after—what happened here only a few days ago, she would never wish to
come back.”

“Nevertheless,” he replied, “she is most anxious to come. This is what
she says. ‘Use every possible means to have Sunnyside vacated. Must go
there at once.’”

“Mr. Harton,” I said testily, “I am not going to do anything of the
kind. I and mine have suffered enough at the hands of this family. I
rented the house at an exorbitant figure and I have moved out here for
the summer. My city home is dismantled and in the hands of decorators.
I have been here one week, during which I have had not a single night
of uninterrupted sleep, and I intend to stay until I have recuperated.
Moreover, if Mr. Armstrong died insolvent, as I believe was the case,
his widow ought to be glad to be rid of so expensive a piece of
property.”

The lawyer cleared his throat.

“I am very sorry you have made this decision,” he said. “Miss Innes,
Mrs. Fitzhugh tells me Louise Armstrong is with you.”

“She is.”

“Has she been informed of this—double bereavement?”

“Not yet,” I said. “She has been very ill; perhaps to-night she can be
told.”

“It is very sad; very sad,” he said. “I have a telegram for her, Mrs.
Innes. Shall I send it out?”

“Better open it and read it to me,” I suggested. “If it is important,
that will save time.”

There was a pause while Mr. Harton opened the telegram. Then he read it
slowly, judicially.

“‘Watch for Nina Carrington. Home Monday. Signed F. L. W.’”

“Hum!” I said. “‘Watch for Nina Carrington. Home Monday.’ Very well,
Mr. Harton, I will tell her, but she is not in condition to watch for
any one.”

“Well, Miss Innes, if you decide to—er—relinquish the lease, let me
know,” the lawyer said.

“I shall not relinquish it,” I replied, and I imagined his irritation
from the way he hung up the receiver.

I wrote the telegram down word for word, afraid to trust my memory, and
decided to ask Doctor Stewart how soon Louise might be told the truth.
The closing of the Traders’ Bank I considered unnecessary for her to
know, but the death of her stepfather and stepbrother must be broken to
her soon, or she might hear it in some unexpected and shocking manner.

Doctor Stewart came about four o’clock, bringing his leather satchel
into the house with a great deal of care, and opening it at the foot of
the stairs to show me a dozen big yellow eggs nesting among the
bottles.

“Real eggs,” he said proudly. “None of your anemic store eggs, but the
real thing—some of them still warm. Feel them! Egg-nog for Miss
Louise.”

He was beaming with satisfaction, and before he left, he insisted on
going back to the pantry and making an egg-nog with his own hands.
Somehow, all the time he was doing it, I had a vision of Doctor
Willoughby, my nerve specialist in the city, trying to make an egg-nog.
I wondered if he ever prescribed anything so plebeian—and so delicious.
And while Doctor Stewart whisked the eggs he talked.

“I said to Mrs. Stewart,” he confided, a little red in the face from
the exertion, “after I went home the other day, that you would think me
an old gossip, for saying what I did about Walker and Miss Louise.”

“Nothing of the sort,” I protested.

“The fact is,” he went on, evidently justifying him self, “I got that
piece of information just as we get a lot of things, through the
kitchen end of the house. Young Walker’s chauffeur—Walker’s more
fashionable than I am, and he goes around the country in a Stanhope
car—well, his chauffeur comes to see our servant girl, and he told her
the whole thing. I thought it was probable, because Walker spent a lot
of time up here last summer, when the family was here, and besides,
Riggs, that’s Walker’s man, had a very pat little story about the
doctor’s building a house on this property, just at the foot of the
hill. The sugar, please.”

The egg-nog was finished. Drop by drop the liquor had cooked the egg,
and now, with a final whisk, a last toss in the shaker, it was ready, a
symphony in gold and white. The doctor sniffed it.

“Real eggs, real milk, and a touch of real Kentucky whisky,” he said.

He insisted on carrying it up himself, but at the foot of the stairs he
paused.

“Riggs said the plans were drawn for the house,” he said, harking back
to the old subject. “Drawn by Huston in town. So I naturally believed
him.”

When the doctor came down, I was ready with a question.

“Doctor,” I asked, “is there any one in the neighborhood named
Carrington? Nina Carrington?”

“Carrington?” He wrinkled his forehead. “Carrington? No, I don’t
remember any such family. There used to be Covingtons down the creek.”

“The name was Carrington,” I said, and the subject lapsed.

Gertrude and Halsey went for a long walk that afternoon, and Louise
slept. Time hung heavy on my hands, and I did as I had fallen into a
habit of doing lately—I sat down and thought things over. One result of
my meditations was that I got up suddenly and went to the telephone. I
had taken the most intense dislike to this Doctor Walker, whom I had
never seen, and who was being talked of in the countryside as the
fiance of Louise Armstrong.

I knew Sam Huston well. There had been a time, when Sam was a good deal
younger than he is now, before he had married Anne Endicott, when I
knew him even better. So now I felt no hesitation in calling him over
the telephone. But when his office boy had given way to his
confidential clerk, and that functionary had condescended to connect
his employer’s desk telephone, I was somewhat at a loss as to how to
begin.

“Why, how are you, Rachel?” Sam said sonorously. “Going to build that
house at Rock View?” It was a twenty-year-old joke of his.

“Sometime, perhaps,” I said. “Just now I want to ask you a question
about something which is none of my business.”

“I see you haven’t changed an iota in a quarter of a century, Rachel.”
This was intended to be another jest. “Ask ahead: everything but my
domestic affairs is at your service.”

“Try to be serious,” I said. “And tell me this: has your firm made any
plans for a house recently, for a Doctor Walker, at Casanova?”

“Yes, we have.”

“Where was it to be built? I have a reason for asking.”

“It was to be, I believe, on the Armstrong place. Mr. Armstrong himself
consulted me, and the inference was—in fact, I am quite certain—the
house was to be occupied by Mr. Armstrong’s daughter, who was engaged
to marry Doctor Walker.”

When the architect had inquired for the different members of my family,
and had finally rung off, I was certain of one thing. Louise Armstrong
was in love with Halsey, and the man she was going to marry was Doctor
Walker. Moreover, this decision was not new; marriage had been
contemplated for some time. There must certainly be some
explanation—but what was it?

That day I repeated to Louise the telegram Mr. Harton had opened.

She seemed to understand, but an unhappier face I have never seen. She
looked like a criminal whose reprieve is over, and the day of execution
approaching.




CHAPTER XV.
LIDDY GIVES THE ALARM


The next day, Friday, Gertrude broke the news of her stepfather’s death
to Louise. She did it as gently as she could, telling her first that he
was very ill, and finally that he was dead. Louise received the news in
the most unexpected manner, and when Gertrude came out to tell me how
she had stood it, I think she was almost shocked.

“She just lay and stared at me, Aunt Ray,” she said. “Do you know, I
believe she is glad, glad! And she is too honest to pretend anything
else. What sort of man was Mr. Paul Armstrong, anyhow?”

“He was a bully as well as a rascal, Gertrude,” I said. “But I am
convinced of one thing; Louise will send for Halsey now, and they will
make it all up.”

For Louise had steadily refused to see Halsey all that day, and the boy
was frantic.

We had a quiet hour, Halsey and I, that evening, and I told him several
things; about the request that we give up the lease to Sunnyside, about
the telegram to Louise, about the rumors of an approaching marriage
between the girl and Doctor Walker, and, last of all, my own interview
with her the day before.

He sat back in a big chair, with his face in the shadow, and my heart
fairly ached for him. He was so big and so boyish! When I had finished
he drew a long breath.

“Whatever Louise does,” he said, “nothing will convince me, Aunt Ray,
that she doesn’t care for me. And up to two months ago, when she and
her mother went west, I was the happiest fellow on earth. Then
something made a difference: she wrote me that her people were opposed
to the marriage; that her feeling for me was what it had always been,
but that something had happened which had changed her ideas as to the
future. I was not to write until she wrote me, and whatever occurred, I
was to think the best I could of her. It sounded like a puzzle. When I
saw her yesterday, it was the same thing, only, perhaps, worse.”

“Halsey,” I asked, “have you any idea of the nature of the interview
between Louise Armstrong and Arnold the night he was murdered?”

“It was stormy. Thomas says once or twice he almost broke into the
room, he was so alarmed for Louise.”

“Another thing, Halsey,” I said, “have you ever heard Louise mention a
woman named Carrington, Nina Carrington?”

“Never,” he said positively.

For try as we would, our thoughts always came back to that fatal
Saturday night, and the murder. Every conversational path led to it,
and we all felt that Jamieson was tightening the threads of evidence
around John Bailey. The detective’s absence was hardly reassuring; he
must have had something to work on in town, or he would have returned.

The papers reported that the cashier of the Traders’ Bank was ill in
his apartments at the Knickerbocker—a condition not surprising,
considering everything. The guilt of the defunct president was no
longer in doubt; the missing bonds had been advertised and some of them
discovered. In every instance they had been used as collateral for
large loans, and the belief was current that not less than a million
and a half dollars had been realized. Every one connected with the bank
had been placed under arrest, and released on heavy bond.

Was he alone in his guilt, or was the cashier his accomplice? Where was
the money? The estate of the dead man was comparatively small—a city
house on a fashionable street, Sunnyside, a large estate largely
mortgaged, an insurance of fifty thousand dollars, and some personal
property—this was all.

The rest lost in speculation probably, the papers said. There was one
thing which looked uncomfortable for Jack Bailey: he and Paul Armstrong
together had promoted a railroad company in New Mexico, and it was
rumored that together they had sunk large sums of money there. The
business alliance between the two men added to the belief that Bailey
knew something of the looting. His unexplained absence from the bank on
Monday lent color to the suspicion against him. The strange thing
seemed to be his surrendering himself on the point of departure. To me,
it seemed the shrewd calculation of a clever rascal. I was not actively
antagonistic to Gertrude’s lover, but I meant to be convinced, one way
or the other. I took no one on faith.

That night the Sunnyside ghost began to walk again. Liddy had been
sleeping in Louise’s dressing-room on a couch, and the approach of dusk
was a signal for her to barricade the entire suite. Situated as it was,
beyond the circular staircase, nothing but an extremity of excitement
would have made her pass it after dark. I confess myself that the place
seemed to me to have a sinister appearance, but we kept that wing well
lighted, and until the lights went out at midnight it was really
cheerful, if one did not know its history.

On Friday night, then, I had gone to bed, resolved to go at once to
sleep. Thoughts that insisted on obtruding themselves I pushed
resolutely to the back of my mind, and I systematically relaxed every
muscle. I fell asleep soon, and was dreaming that Doctor Walker was
building his new house immediately in front of my windows: I could hear
the thump-thump of the hammers, and then I waked to a knowledge that
somebody was pounding on my door.

I was up at once, and with the sound of my footstep on the floor the
low knocking ceased, to be followed immediately by sibilant whispering
through the keyhole.

“Miss Rachel! Miss Rachel!” somebody was saying, over and over.

“Is that you, Liddy?” I asked, my hand on the knob.

“For the love of mercy, let me in!” she said in a low tone.

She was leaning against the door, for when I opened it, she fell in.
She was greenish-white, and she had a red and black barred flannel
petticoat over her shoulders.

“Listen,” she said, standing in the middle of the floor and holding on
to me. “Oh, Miss Rachel, it’s the ghost of that dead man hammering to
get in!”

Sure enough, there was a dull thud—thud—thud from some place near. It
was muffled: one rather felt than heard it, and it was impossible to
locate. One moment it seemed to come, three taps and a pause, from the
floor under us: the next, thud—thud—thud—it came apparently from the
wall.

“It’s not a ghost,” I said decidedly. “If it was a ghost it wouldn’t
rap: it would come through the keyhole.” Liddy looked at the keyhole.
“But it sounds very much as though some one is trying to break into the
house.”

Liddy was shivering violently. I told her to get me my slippers and she
brought me a pair of kid gloves, so I found my things myself, and
prepared to call Halsey. As before, the night alarm had found the
electric lights gone: the hall, save for its night lamp, was in
darkness, as I went across to Halsey’s room. I hardly know what I
feared, but it was a relief to find him there, very sound asleep, and
with his door unlocked.

“Wake up, Halsey,” I said, shaking him.

He stirred a little. Liddy was half in and half out of the door, afraid
as usual to be left alone, and not quite daring to enter. Her scruples
seemed to fade, however, all at once. She gave a suppressed yell,
bolted into the room, and stood tightly clutching the foot-board of the
bed. Halsey was gradually waking.

“I’ve seen it,” Liddy wailed. “A woman in white down the hall!”

I paid no attention.

“Halsey,” I persevered, “some one is breaking into the house. Get up,
won’t you?”

“It isn’t our house,” he said sleepily. And then he roused to the
exigency of the occasion. “All right, Aunt Ray,” he said, still
yawning. “If you’ll let me get into something—”

It was all I could do to get Liddy out of the room. The demands of the
occasion had no influence on her: she had seen the ghost, she
persisted, and she wasn’t going into the hall. But I got her over to my
room at last, more dead than alive, and made her lie down on the bed.

The tappings, which seemed to have ceased for a while, had commenced
again, but they were fainter. Halsey came over in a few minutes, and
stood listening and trying to locate the sound.

“Give me my revolver, Aunt Ray,” he said; and I got it—the one I had
found in the tulip bed—and gave it to him. He saw Liddy there and
divined at once that Louise was alone.

“You let me attend to this fellow, whoever it is, Aunt Ray, and go to
Louise, will you? She may be awake and alarmed.”

So in spite of her protests, I left Liddy alone and went back to the
east wing. Perhaps I went a little faster past the yawning blackness of
the circular staircase; and I could hear Halsey creaking cautiously
down the main staircase. The rapping, or pounding, had ceased, and the
silence was almost painful. And then suddenly, from apparently under my
very feet, there rose a woman’s scream, a cry of terror that broke off
as suddenly as it came. I stood frozen and still. Every drop of blood
in my body seemed to leave the surface and gather around my heart. In
the dead silence that followed it throbbed as if it would burst. More
dead than alive, I stumbled into Louise’s bedroom. She was not there!




CHAPTER XVI.
IN THE EARLY MORNING


I stood looking at the empty bed. The coverings had been thrown back,
and Louise’s pink silk dressing-gown was gone from the foot, where it
had lain. The night lamp burned dimly, revealing the emptiness of the
place. I picked it up, but my hand shook so that I put it down again,
and got somehow to the door.

There were voices in the hall and Gertrude came running toward me.

“What is it?” she cried. “What was that sound? Where is Louise?”

“She is not in her room,” I said stupidly. “I think—it was she—who
screamed.”

Liddy had joined us now, carrying a light. We stood huddled together at
the head of the circular staircase, looking down into its shadows.
There was nothing to be seen, and it was absolutely quiet down there.
Then we heard Halsey running up the main staircase. He came quickly
down the hall to where we were standing.

“There’s no one trying to get in. I thought I heard some one shriek.
Who was it?”

Our stricken faces told him the truth.

“Some one screamed down there,” I said. “And—and Louise is not in her
room.”

With a jerk Halsey took the light from Liddy and ran down the circular
staircase. I followed him, more slowly. My nerves seemed to be in a
state of paralysis: I could scarcely step. At the foot of the stairs
Halsey gave an exclamation and put down the light.

“Aunt Ray,” he called sharply.

At the foot of the staircase, huddled in a heap, her head on the lower
stair, was Louise Armstrong. She lay limp and white, her dressing-gown
dragging loose from one sleeve of her night-dress, and the heavy braid
of her dark hair stretching its length a couple of steps above her
head, as if she had slipped down.

She was not dead: Halsey put her down on the floor, and began to rub
her cold hands, while Gertrude and Liddy ran for stimulants. As for me,
I sat there at the foot of that ghostly staircase—sat, because my knees
wouldn’t hold me—and wondered where it would all end. Louise was still
unconscious, but she was breathing better, and I suggested that we get
her back to bed before she came to. There was something grisly and
horrible to me, seeing her there in almost the same attitude and in the
same place where we had found her brother’s body. And to add to the
similarity, just then the hall clock, far off, struck faintly three
o’clock.

It was four before Louise was able to talk, and the first rays of dawn
were coming through her windows, which faced the east, before she could
tell us coherently what had occurred. I give it as she told it. She lay
propped in bed, and Halsey sat beside her, unrebuffed, and held her
hand while she talked.

“I was not sleeping well,” she began, “partly, I think, because I had
slept during the afternoon. Liddy brought me some hot milk at ten
o’clock and I slept until twelve. Then I wakened and—I got to thinking
about things, and worrying, so I could not go to sleep.

“I was wondering why I had not heard from Arnold since the—since I saw
him that night at the lodge. I was afraid he was ill, because—he was to
have done something for me, and he had not come back. It must have been
three when I heard some one rapping. I sat up and listened, to be quite
sure, and the rapping kept up. It was cautious, and I was about to call
Liddy.

“Then suddenly I thought I knew what it was. The east entrance and the
circular staircase were always used by Arnold when he was out late, and
sometimes, when he forgot his key, he would rap and I would go down and
let him in. I thought he had come back to see me—I didn’t think about
the time, for his hours were always erratic. But I was afraid I was too
weak to get down the stairs.

“The knocking kept up, and just as I was about to call Liddy, she ran
through the room and out into the hall. I got up then, feeling weak and
dizzy, and put on my dressing-gown. If it was Arnold, I knew I must see
him.

“It was very dark everywhere, but, of course, I knew my way. I felt
along for the stair-rail, and went down as quickly as I could. The
knocking had stopped, and I was afraid I was too late. I got to the
foot of the staircase and over to the door on to the east veranda. I
had never thought of anything but that it was Arnold, until I reached
the door. It was unlocked and opened about an inch. Everything was
black: it was perfectly dark outside. I felt very queer and shaky. Then
I thought perhaps Arnold had used his key; he did—strange things
sometimes, and I turned around. Just as I reached the foot of the
staircase I thought I heard some one coming. My nerves were going
anyhow, there in the dark, and I could scarcely stand. I got up as far
as the third or fourth step; then I felt that some one was coming
toward me on the staircase. The next instant a hand met mine on the
stair-rail. Some one brushed past me, and I screamed. Then I must have
fainted.”

That was Louise’s story. There could be no doubt of its truth, and the
thing that made it inexpressibly awful to me was that the poor girl had
crept down to answer the summons of a brother who would never need her
kindly offices again. Twice now, without apparent cause, some one had
entered the house by means of the east entrance: had apparently gone
his way unhindered through the house, and gone out again as he had
entered. Had this unknown visitor been there a third time, the night
Arnold Armstrong was murdered? Or a fourth, the time Mr. Jamieson had
locked some one in the clothes chute?

Sleep was impossible, I think, for any of us. We dispersed finally to
bathe and dress, leaving Louise little the worse for her experience.
But I determined that before the day was over she must know the true
state of affairs. Another decision I made, and I put it into execution
immediately after breakfast. I had one of the unused bedrooms in the
east wing, back along the small corridor, prepared for occupancy, and
from that time on, Alex, the gardener, slept there. One man in that
barn of a house was an absurdity, with things happening all the time,
and I must say that Alex was as unobjectionable as any one could
possibly have been.

The next morning, also, Halsey and I made an exhaustive examination of
the circular staircase, the small entry at its foot, and the card-room
opening from it. There was no evidence of anything unusual the night
before, and had we not ourselves heard the rapping noises, I should
have felt that Louise’s imagination had run away with her. The outer
door was closed and locked, and the staircase curved above us, for all
the world like any other staircase.

Halsey, who had never taken seriously my account of the night Liddy and
I were there alone, was grave enough now. He examined the paneling of
the wainscoting above and below the stairs, evidently looking for a
secret door, and suddenly there flashed into my mind the recollection
of a scrap of paper that Mr. Jamieson had found among Arnold
Armstrong’s effects. As nearly as possible I repeated its contents to
him, while Halsey took them down in a note-book.

“I wish you had told me that before,” he said, as he put the memorandum
carefully away. We found nothing at all in the house, and I expected
little from any examination of the porch and grounds. But as we opened
the outer door something fell into the entry with a clatter. It was a
cue from the billiard-room.

Halsey picked it up with an exclamation.

“That’s careless enough,” he said. “Some of the servants have been
amusing themselves.”

I was far from convinced. Not one of the servants would go into that
wing at night unless driven by dire necessity. And a billiard cue! As a
weapon of either offense or defense it was an absurdity, unless one
accepted Liddy’s hypothesis of a ghost, and even then, as Halsey
pointed out, a billiard-playing ghost would be a very modern evolution
of an ancient institution.

That afternoon we, Gertrude, Halsey and I, attended the coroner’s
inquest in town. Doctor Stewart had been summoned also, it transpiring
that in that early Sunday morning, when Gertrude and I had gone to our
rooms, he had been called to view the body. We went, the four of us, in
the machine, preferring the execrable roads to the matinee train, with
half of Casanova staring at us. And on the way we decided to say
nothing of Louise and her interview with her stepbrother the night he
died. The girl was in trouble enough as it was.




CHAPTER XVII.
A HINT OF SCANDAL


In giving the gist of what happened at the inquest, I have only one
excuse—to recall to the reader the events of the night of Arnold
Armstrong’s murder. Many things had occurred which were not brought out
at the inquest and some things were told there that were new to me.
Altogether, it was a gloomy affair, and the six men in the corner, who
constituted the coroner’s jury, were evidently the merest puppets in
the hands of that all-powerful gentleman, the coroner.

Gertrude and I sat well back, with our veils down. There were a number
of people I knew: Barbara Fitzhugh, in extravagant mourning—she always
went into black on the slightest provocation, because it was
becoming—and Mr. Jarvis, the man who had come over from the Greenwood
Club the night of the murder. Mr. Harton was there, too, looking
impatient as the inquest dragged, but alive to every particle of
evidence. From a corner Mr. Jamieson was watching the proceedings
intently.

Doctor Stewart was called first. His evidence was told briefly, and
amounted to this: on the Sunday morning previous, at a quarter before
five, he had been called to the telephone. The message was from a Mr.
Jarvis, who asked him to come at once to Sunnyside, as there had been
an accident there, and Mr. Arnold Armstrong had been shot. He had
dressed hastily, gathered up some instruments, and driven to Sunnyside.

He was met by Mr. Jarvis, who took him at once to the east wing. There,
just as he had fallen, was the body of Arnold Armstrong. There was no
need of the instruments: the man was dead. In answer to the coroner’s
question—no, the body had not been moved, save to turn it over. It lay
at the foot of the circular staircase. Yes, he believed death had been
instantaneous. The body was still somewhat warm and rigor mortis had
not set in. It occurred late in cases of sudden death. No, he believed
the probability of suicide might be eliminated; the wounds could have
been self-inflicted, but with difficulty, and there had been no weapon
found.

The doctor’s examination was over, but he hesitated and cleared his
throat.

“Mr. Coroner,” he said, “at the risk of taking up valuable time, I
would like to speak of an incident that may or may not throw some light
on this matter.”

The audience was alert at once.

“Kindly proceed, Doctor,” the coroner said.

“My home is in Englewood, two miles from Casanova,” the doctor began.
“In the absence of Doctor Walker, a number of Casanova people have been
consulting me. A month ago—five weeks, to be exact—a woman whom I had
never seen came to my office. She was in deep mourning and kept her
veil down, and she brought for examination a child, a boy of six. The
little fellow was ill; it looked like typhoid, and the mother was
frantic. She wanted a permit to admit the youngster to the Children’s
Hospital in town here, where I am a member of the staff, and I gave her
one. The incident would have escaped me, but for a curious thing. Two
days before Mr. Armstrong was shot, I was sent for to go to the Country
Club: some one had been struck with a golf-ball that had gone wild. It
was late when I left—I was on foot, and about a mile from the club, on
the Claysburg road, I met two people. They were disputing violently,
and I had no difficulty in recognizing Mr. Armstrong. The woman, beyond
doubt, was the one who had consulted me about the child.”

At this hint of scandal, Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh sat up very straight.
Jamieson was looking slightly skeptical, and the coroner made a note.

“The Children’s Hospital, you say, Doctor?” he asked.

“Yes. But the child, who was entered as Lucien Wallace, was taken away
by his mother two weeks ago. I have tried to trace them and failed.”

All at once I remembered the telegram sent to Louise by some one signed
F. L. W.—presumably Doctor Walker. Could this veiled woman be the Nina
Carrington of the message? But it was only idle speculation. I had no
way of finding out, and the inquest was proceeding.

The report of the coroner’s physician came next. The post-mortem
examination showed that the bullet had entered the chest in the fourth
left intercostal space and had taken an oblique course downward and
backward, piercing both the heart and lungs. The left lung was
collapsed, and the exit point of the ball had been found in the muscles
of the back to the left of the spinal column. It was improbable that
such a wound had been self-inflicted, and its oblique downward course
pointed to the fact that the shot had been fired from above. In other
words, as the murdered man had been found dead at the foot of a
staircase, it was probable that the shot had been fired by some one
higher up on the stairs. There were no marks of powder. The bullet, a
thirty-eight caliber, had been found in the dead man’s clothing, and
was shown to the jury.

Mr. Jarvis was called next, but his testimony amounted to little.

He had been summoned by telephone to Sunnyside, had come over at once
with the steward and Mr. Winthrop, at present out of town. They had
been admitted by the housekeeper, and had found the body lying at the
foot of the staircase. He had made a search for a weapon, but there was
none around. The outer entry door in the east wing had been unfastened
and was open about an inch.

I had been growing more and more nervous. When the coroner called Mr.
John Bailey, the room was filled with suppressed excitement. Mr.
Jamieson went forward and spoke a few words to the coroner, who nodded.
Then Halsey was called.

“Mr. Innes,” the coroner said, “will you tell under what circumstances
you saw Mr. Arnold Armstrong the night he died?”

“I saw him first at the Country Club,” Halsey said quietly. He was
rather pale, but very composed. “I stopped there with my automobile for
gasolene. Mr. Armstrong had been playing cards. When I saw him there,
he was coming out of the card-room, talking to Mr. John Bailey.”

“The nature of the discussion—was it amicable?”

Halsey hesitated.

“They were having a dispute,” he said. “I asked Mr. Bailey to leave the
club with me and come to Sunnyside over Sunday.”

“Isn’t it a fact, Mr. Innes, that you took Mr. Bailey away from the
club-house because you were afraid there would be blows?”

“The situation was unpleasant,” Halsey said evasively.

“At that time had you any suspicion that the Traders’ Bank had been
wrecked?”

“No.”

“What occurred next?”

“Mr. Bailey and I talked in the billiard-room until two-thirty.”

“And Mr. Arnold Armstrong came there, while you were talking?”

“Yes. He came about half-past two. He rapped at the east door, and I
admitted him.”

The silence in the room was intense. Mr. Jamieson’s eyes never left
Halsey’s face.

“Will you tell us the nature of his errand?”

“He brought a telegram that had come to the club for Mr. Bailey.”

“He was sober?”

“Perfectly, at that time. Not earlier.”

“Was not his apparent friendliness a change from his former attitude?”

“Yes. I did not understand it.”

“How long did he stay?”

“About five minutes. Then he left, by the east entrance.”

“What occurred then?”

“We talked for a few minutes, discussing a plan Mr. Bailey had in mind.
Then I went to the stables, where I kept my car, and got it out.”

“Leaving Mr. Bailey alone in the billiard-room?”

Halsey hesitated.

“My sister was there.”

Mrs. Ogden Fitzhugh had the courage to turn and eye Gertrude through
her lorgnon.

“And then?”

“I took the car along the lower road, not to disturb the household. Mr.
Bailey came down across the lawn, through the hedge, and got into the
car on the road.”

“Then you know nothing of Mr. Armstrong’s movements after he left the
house?”

“Nothing. I read of his death Monday evening for the first time.”

“Mr. Bailey did not see him on his way across the lawn?”

“I think not. If he had seen him he would have spoken of it.”

“Thank you. That is all. Miss Gertrude Innes.”

Gertrude’s replies were fully as concise as Halsey’s. Mrs. Fitzhugh
subjected her to a close inspection, commencing with her hat and ending
with her shoes. I flatter myself she found nothing wrong with either
her gown or her manner, but poor Gertrude’s testimony was the reverse
of comforting. She had been summoned, she said, by her brother, after
Mr. Armstrong had gone.

She had waited in the billiard-room with Mr. Bailey, until the
automobile had been ready. Then she had locked the door at the foot of
the staircase, and, taking a lamp, had accompanied Mr. Bailey to the
main entrance of the house, and had watched him cross the lawn. Instead
of going at once to her room, she had gone back to the billiard-room
for something which had been left there. The card-room and
billiard-room were in darkness. She had groped around, found the
article she was looking for, and was on the point of returning to her
room, when she had heard some one fumbling at the lock at the east
outer door. She had thought it was probably her brother, and had been
about to go to the door, when she heard it open. Almost immediately
there was a shot, and she had run panic-stricken through the
drawing-room and had roused the house.

“You heard no other sound?” the coroner asked. “There was no one with
Mr. Armstrong when he entered?”

“It was perfectly dark. There were no voices and I heard nothing. There
was just the opening of the door, the shot, and the sound of somebody
falling.”

“Then, while you went through the drawing-room and up-stairs to alarm
the household, the criminal, whoever it was, could have escaped by the
east door?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. That will do.”

I flatter myself that the coroner got little enough out of me. I saw
Mr. Jamieson smiling to himself, and the coroner gave me up, after a
time. I admitted I had found the body, said I had not known who it was
until Mr. Jarvis told me, and ended by looking up at Barbara Fitzhugh
and saying that in renting the house I had not expected to be involved
in any family scandal. At which she turned purple.

The verdict was that Arnold Armstrong had met his death at the hands of
a person or persons unknown, and we all prepared to leave. Barbara
Fitzhugh flounced out without waiting to speak to me, but Mr. Harton
came up, as I knew he would.

“You have decided to give up the house, I hope, Miss Innes,” he said.
“Mrs. Armstrong has wired me again.”

“I am not going to give it up,” I maintained, “until I understand some
things that are puzzling me. The day that the murderer is discovered, I
will leave.”

“Then, judging by what I have heard, you will be back in the city very
soon,” he said. And I knew that he suspected the discredited cashier of
the Traders’ Bank.

Mr. Jamieson came up to me as I was about to leave the coroner’s
office.

“How is your patient?” he asked with his odd little smile.

“I have no patient,” I replied, startled.

“I will put it in a different way, then. How is Miss Armstrong?”

“She—she is doing very well,” I stammered.

“Good,” cheerfully. “And our ghost? Is it laid?”

“Mr. Jamieson,” I said suddenly, “I wish you would do one thing: I wish
you would come to Sunnyside and spend a few days there. The ghost is
not laid. I want you to spend one night at least watching the circular
staircase. The murder of Arnold Armstrong was a beginning, not an end.”

He looked serious.

“Perhaps I can do it,” he said. “I have been doing something else,
but—well, I will come out to-night.”

We were very silent during the trip back to Sunnyside. I watched
Gertrude closely and somewhat sadly. To me there was one glaring flaw
in her story, and it seemed to stand out for every one to see. Arnold
Armstrong had had no key, and yet she said she had locked the east
door. He must have been admitted from within the house; over and over I
repeated it to myself.

That night, as gently as I could, I told Louise the story of her
stepbrother’s death. She sat in her big, pillow-filled chair, and heard
me through without interruption. It was clear that she was shocked
beyond words: if I had hoped to learn anything from her expression, I
had failed. She was as much in the dark as we were.




CHAPTER XVIII.
A HOLE IN THE WALL


My taking the detective out to Sunnyside raised an unexpected storm of
protest from Gertrude and Halsey. I was not prepared for it, and I
scarcely knew how to account for it. To me Mr. Jamieson was far less
formidable under my eyes where I knew what he was doing, than he was
off in the city, twisting circumstances and motives to suit himself and
learning what he wished to know, about events at Sunnyside, in some
occult way. I was glad enough to have him there, when excitements began
to come thick and fast.

A new element was about to enter into affairs: Monday, or Tuesday at
the latest, would find Doctor Walker back in his green and white house
in the village, and Louise’s attitude to him in the immediate future
would signify Halsey’s happiness or wretchedness, as it might turn out.
Then, too, the return of her mother would mean, of course, that she
would have to leave us, and I had become greatly attached to her.

From the day Mr. Jamieson came to Sunnyside there was a subtle change
in Gertrude’s manner to me. It was elusive, difficult to analyze, but
it was there. She was no longer frank with me, although I think her
affection never wavered. At the time I laid the change to the fact that
I had forbidden all communication with John Bailey, and had refused to
acknowledge any engagement between the two. Gertrude spent much of her
time wandering through the grounds, or taking long cross-country walks.
Halsey played golf at the Country Club day after day, and after Louise
left, as she did the following week, Mr. Jamieson and I were much
together. He played a fair game of cribbage, but he cheated at
solitaire.

The night the detective arrived, Saturday, I had a talk with him.

I told him of the experience Louise Armstrong had had the night before,
on the circular staircase, and about the man who had so frightened
Rosie on the drive. I saw that he thought the information was
important, and to my suggestion that we put an additional lock on the
east wing door he opposed a strong negative.

“I think it probable,” he said, “that our visitor will be back again,
and the thing to do is to leave things exactly as they are, to avoid
rousing suspicion. Then I can watch for at least a part of each night
and probably Mr. Innes will help us out. I would say as little to
Thomas as possible. The old man knows more than he is willing to
admit.”

I suggested that Alex, the gardener, would probably be willing to help,
and Mr. Jamieson undertook to make the arrangement. For one night,
however, Mr. Jamieson preferred to watch alone. Apparently nothing
occurred. The detective sat in absolute darkness on the lower step of
the stairs, dozing, he said afterwards, now and then. Nothing could
pass him in either direction, and the door in the morning remained as
securely fastened as it had been the night before. And yet one of the
most inexplicable occurrences of the whole affair took place that very
night.

Liddy came to my room on Sunday morning with a face as long as the
moral law. She laid out my things as usual, but I missed her customary
garrulousness. I was not regaled with the new cook’s extravagance as to
eggs, and she even forbore to mention “that Jamieson,” on whose arrival
she had looked with silent disfavor.

“What’s the matter, Liddy?” I asked at last. “Didn’t you sleep last
night?”

“No, ma’m,” she said stiffly.

“Did you have two cups of coffee at your dinner?” I inquired.

“No, ma’m,” indignantly.

I sat up and almost upset my hot water—I always take a cup of hot water
with a pinch of salt, before I get up. It tones the stomach.

“Liddy Allen,” I said, “stop combing that switch and tell me what is
wrong with you.”

Liddy heaved a sigh.

“Girl and woman,” she said, “I’ve been with you twenty-five years, Miss
Rachel, through good temper and bad—” the idea! and what I have taken
from her in the way of sulks!—“but I guess I can’t stand it any longer.
My trunk’s packed.”

“Who packed it?” I asked, expecting from her tone to be told she had
wakened to find it done by some ghostly hand.

“I did; Miss Rachel, you won’t believe me when I tell you this house is
haunted. Who was it fell down the clothes chute? Who was it scared Miss
Louise almost into her grave?”

“I’m doing my best to find out,” I said. “What in the world are 

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