The Lady Sleuths MEGAPACK TM(328)

                “And for this reason you let her fit herself out with clothes down to her very undergarments?”

                “Yes; strange as it may seem, I was just such a fool. I had entered into her scheme, and the means she took to change her personality only amused me. She wished to present herself to my father as a girl obliged to work for her living, and was too shrewd to excite suspicion in the minds of any of the family by any undue luxury in her apparel. At least that was the excuse she gave me for the precautions she took, though I think the delight she experienced in anything romantic and unusual had as much to do with it as anything else. She enjoyed the game she was playing, and wished to make as much of it as possible.”

                “Were her own garments much richer than those she ordered from Altman’s?”

                “Undoubtedly. Mrs. Van Burnam wore nothing made by American seamstresses. Fine clothes were her weakness.”



                             “I see, I see; but why such an attempt on your part to keep yourself in the background? Why let your wife write your assumed names in the hotel register, for instance, instead of doing it yourself?”

                “It was easier for her; I know no other reason. She did not mind putting down the name Pope. I did.”

                It was an ungracious reflection upon his wife, and he seemed to feel it so; for he almost immediately added: “A man will sometimes lend himself to a scheme of which the details are obnoxious. It was so in this case; but she was too interested in her plans to be affected by so small a matter as this.”

                This explained more than one mysterious action on the part of this pair while they were at the Hotel D——. The Coroner evidently considered it in this light, for he dwelt but little longer on this phase of the case, passing at once to a fact concerning which curiosity had hitherto been roused without receiving any satisfaction.

                “In leaving the hotel,” said he, “you and your wife were seen carrying certain packages, which were missing from your arms when you alighted at Mr. Van Burnam’s house. What was in those packages, and where did you dispose of them before you entered the second carriage?”

                Howard made no demur in answering.

                “My wife’s clothes were in them,” said he, “and we dropped them somewhere on Twenty-seventh Street near Third Avenue, just as we saw an old woman coming along the sidewalk. We knew that she would stop and pick them up, and she did, for we slid into a dark shadow made by a projecting stoop and watched her. Is that too simple a method for disposing of certain encumbering bundles, to be believed, sir?”

                “That is for the jury to decide,” answered the Coroner, stiffly. “But why were you so anxious to dispose of these articles? Were they not worth some money, and would it not have been simpler and much more natural to have left them at the hotel till you chose to send for them? That is, if you were simply engaged in playing, as you say, a game upon your father, and not upon the whole community?”



                             “Yes,” Mr. Van Burnam acknowledged, “that would have been the natural thing, no doubt; but we were not following natural instincts at the time, but a woman’s bizarre caprices. We did as I said; and laughed long, I assure you, over its unqualified success; for the old woman not only grabbed the packages with avidity, but turned and fled away with them, just as if she had expected this opportunity and had prepared herself to make the most of it.”

                “It was very laughable, certainly,” observed the Coroner, in a hard voice. “You must have found it very ridiculous”; and after giving the witness a look full of something deeper than sarcasm, he turned towards the jury as if to ask them what they thought of these very forced and suspicious explanations.