The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(279)

                “How can you say that,” I cried, “when her admittance here was due to a young man who let her in at midnight with a key, and then left her to eat out her heart in this great house all alone.”

                I have made sensations in my life, but never quite so marked a one as this. In an instant every eye was on me, with the exception of the detective’s. His was on the figure crowning the newel-post, and bitterly severe his gaze was too, though it immediately grew wary as the young man started towards me and impetuously demanded:

                “Who talks like that? Why, it’s Miss Butterworth. Madam, I fear I did not fully understand what you said.”

                Whereupon I repeated my words, this time very quietly but clearly, while Mr. Gryce continued to frown at the bronze figure he had taken into his confidence. When I had finished, Mr. Van Burnam’s countenance had changed, so had his manner. He held himself as erect as before, but not with as much bravado. He showed haste and impatience also, but not the same kind of haste and not quite the same kind of impatience. The corners of Mr. Gryce’s mouth betrayed that he noted this change, but he did not turn away from the newel-post.



                             “This is a remarkable circumstance which you have just told me,” observed Mr. Van Burnam, with the first bow I had ever received from him. “I don’t know what to think of it. But I still hold that it’s some thief. Killed, did you say? Really dead? Well, I’d have given five hundred dollars not to have had it happen in this house.”

                He had been moving towards the parlor door, and he now entered it. Instantly Mr. Gryce was by his side.

                “Are they going to close the door?” I whispered to the reporter, who was taking this all in equally with myself.

                “I’m afraid so,” he muttered.

                And they did. Mr. Gryce had evidently had enough of my interference, and was resolved to shut me out, but I heard one word and caught one glimpse of Mr. Van Burnam’s face before the heavy door fell to. The word was: “Oh, so bad as that! How can any one recognize her—” And the glimpse—well, the glimpse proved to me that he was much more profoundly agitated than he wished to appear, and any extraordinary agitation on his part was certainly in direct contradiction to the very sentence he was at that moment uttering.


CHAPTER IV

                SILAS VAN BURNAM

                “However much I may be needed at home, I I cannot reconcile it with my sense of duty to leave just yet,” I confided to the reporter, with what I meant to be a proper show of reason and self-restraint; “Mr. Van Burnam may wish to ask me some questions.”

                “Of course, of course,” acquiesced the other. “You are very right; always are very right, I should judge.”

                As I did not know what he meant by this, I frowned, always a wise thing to do in an uncertainty; that is—if one wishes to maintain an air of independence and aversion to flattery.



                             “Will you not sit down?” he suggested. “There is a chair at the end of the hall.”

                But I had no need to sit. The front door-bell again rang, and simultaneously with its opening, the parlor door unclosed and Mr. Franklin Van Burnam appeared in the hall, just as Mr. Silas Van Burnam, his father, stepped into the vestibule.

                “Father!” he remonstrated, with a troubled air; “could you not wait?”

                The elder gentleman, who had evidently just been driven up from the steamer, wiped his forehead with an irascible air, that I will say I had noticed in him before and on much less provocation.