The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(285)

                But this intimation did not seem to bring comfort with it. Mr. Van Burnam walked away, white and sick, for which display of emotion there was certainly some cause, and rejoining his father tried to carry off the moment with the aplomb of a man of the world.

                But that father’s eye was fixed too steadily upon him; he faltered as he sat down, and finally spoke up, with feverish energy:

                “If it is she, so help me, God, her death is a mystery to me! We have quarrelled more than once lately, and I have sometimes lost my patience with her, but she had no reason to wish for death, and I am ready to swear in defiance of those hands, which are certainly like hers, and the nameless something which Franklin calls a likeness, that it is a stranger who lies there, and that her death in our house is a coincidence.”

                “Well, well, we will wait,” was the detective’s soothing reply. “Sit down in the room opposite there, and give me your orders for supper, and I will see that a good meal is served you.”

                The three gentlemen, seeing no way of refusing, followed the discreet official who preceded them, and the door of the doctor’s room closed upon him and the inquiries he was about to make.


CHAPTER VI

                NEW FACTS

                Mr. Van Burnam and his sons had gone through the formality of a supper and were conversing in the haphazard way natural to men filled with a subject they dare not discuss, when the door opened and Mr. Gryce came in.

                Advancing very calmly, he addressed himself to the father:



                             “I am sorry,” said he, “to be obliged to inform you that this affair is much more serious than we anticipated. This young woman was dead before the shelves laden with bric-à-brac fell upon her. It is a case of murder; obviously so, or I should not presume to forestall the Coroner’s jury in their verdict.”

                Murder! it is a word to shake the stoutest heart!

                The older gentleman reeled as he half rose, and Franklin, his son, betrayed in his own way an almost equal amount of emotion. But Howard, shrugging his shoulders as if relieved of an immense weight, looked about with a cheerful air, and briskly cried:

                “Then it is not the body of my wife you have there. No one would murder Louise. I shall go away and prove the truth of my words by hunting her up at once.”

                The detective opened the door, beckoned in the doctor, who whispered two or three words into Howard’s ear.

                They failed to awake the emotion he evidently expected. Howard looked surprised, but answered without any change of voice:

                “Yes, Louise had such a scar; and if it is true that this woman is similarly marked, then it is a mere coincidence. Nothing will convince me that my wife has been the victim of murder.”

                “Had you not better take a look at the scar just mentioned?”

                “No. I am so sure of what I say that I will not even consider the possibility of my being mistaken. I have examined the clothing on this body you have shown me, and not one article of it came from my wife’s wardrobe; nor would my wife go, as you have informed me this woman did, into a dark house at night with any other man than her husband.”

                “And so you absolutely refuse to acknowledge her.”

                “Most certainly.”

                The detective paused, glanced at the troubled faces of the other two gentlemen, faces that had not perceptibly altered during these declarations, and suggestively remarked: