It was Edith who brought Mrs. Butler to my mind. Fred had maintained that she had fled before the intruders, and was probably in some closet or corner of the upper floor. I am afraid our solicitude was long in coming. It was almost an hour before we organized a searching party to look for her. Fred went up-stairs, and I took the lower floor.

It was I who found her, after all, lying full length on the gra.s.s in the little square yard back of the house. She was in a dead faint, and she was a much more difficult patient than Margery.

We could get no story from either of them that night. The two rooms had been ransacked, but apparently nothing had been stolen. Fred vowed he had locked and bolted the kitchen door, and that it had been opened from within.

It was a strange experience, that night intrusion into the house, without robbery as a motive. If Margery knew or suspected the reason for the outrage, she refused to say. As for Mrs. Butler, to mention the occurrence put her into hysteria. It was Fred who put forth the most startling theory of the lot.

"By George," he said the next morning when we had failed to find tracks in the yard, and Edith had reported every silver spoon in its place, "by George, it wouldn't surprise me if the lady in the grave clothes did it herself. There isn't anything a hysterical woman won't do to rouse your interest in her, if it begins to flag. How did any one get in through that kitchen door, when it was locked inside and bolted? I tell you, she opened it herself."

I did not like to force Margery's confidence, but I believed that the outrage was directly for the purpose of searching her room, perhaps for papers that had been her father's. Mrs. Butler came around enough by morning, to tell a semi-connected story in which she claimed that two men had come in from a veranda roof, and tried to chloroform her. That she had pretended to be asleep and had taken the first opportunity, while they were in the other room, to run down-stairs and into the yard.

Edith thought it likely enough, being a credulous person.

As it turned out, Edith's intuition was more reliable than my skepticism,--or Fred's.

CHAPTER XIX

BACK TO BELLWOOD

The inability of Margery Fleming to tell who had chloroformed her, and Mrs. Butler's white face and brooding eyes made a very respectable mystery out of the affair. Only Fred, Edith and I came down to breakfast that morning. Fred's expression was half amused, half puzzled. Edith fluttered uneasily over the coffee machine, her cheeks as red as the bow of ribbon at her throat. I was preoccupied, and, like Fred, I propped the morning paper in front of me and proceeded to think in its shelter.

"Did you find anything, Fred?" Edith asked. Fred did not reply, so she repeated the question with some emphasis.

"Eh--what?" Fred inquired, peering around the corner of the paper.

"Did--you--find--any--clue?"

"Yes, dear--that is, no. Nothing to amount to anything. Upon my soul, Jack, if I wrote the editorials of this paper, I'd _say_ something." He subsided into inarticulate growls behind the paper, and everything was quiet. Then I heard a sniffle, distinctly. I looked up. Edith was crying--pouring cream into a coffee cup, and feeling blindly for the sugar, with her pretty face twisted and her pretty eyes obscured. In a second I was up, had crumpled the newspapers, including Fred's, into a ball, and had lifted him bodily out of his chair.

"When I am married," I said fiercely, jerking him around to Edith and pushing him into a chair beside her, "if I ever read the paper at breakfast when my wife is bursting for conversation, may I have some good and faithful friend who will bring me back to a sense of my duty."

I drew a chair to Edith's other side. "Now, let's talk," I said.

She wiped her eyes shamelessly with her table napkin. "There isn't a soul in this house I can talk to," she wailed. "All kinds of awful things happening--and we had to send for coffee this morning, Jack. You must have used four pounds last night--and n.o.body will tell me a thing.

There's no use asking Margery--she's sick at her stomach from the chloroform--and Ellen never talks except about herself, and she's horribly--uninteresting. And Fred and you make a ba--barricade out of newspapers, and fire 'yes' at me when you mean 'no.'"

"I put the coffee back where I got it, Edith," I protested stoutly. "I know we're barbarians, but I'll swear to that." And then I stopped, for I had a sudden recollection of going up-stairs with something fat and tinny in my arms, of finding it in my way, and of hastily thrusting it into the boys' boot closet under the nursery stair.

Fred had said nothing. He had taken her hand and was patting it gently, the while his eye sought the head-lines on the wad of morning paper.

"You burned that blue rug," she said to me disconsolately, with a threat of fresh tears. "It took me ages to find the right shade of blue."

"I will buy you that Shirvan you wanted," I hastened to a.s.sure her.

"Yes, to take away when you get married." There is a hint of the shrew in all good women.

"I will buy the Shirvan and _not_ get married."

Here, I regret to say, Edith suddenly laughed. She threw her head back and jeered at me.

"You!" she chortled, and pointed one slim finger at me mockingly. "You, who are so mad about one girl that you love all women for her sake! You, who go white instead of red when she comes into the room! You, who have let your practice go to the dogs to be near her, and then never speak to her when she's around, but sit with your mouth open like a puppy begging for candy, ready to snap up every word she throws you and wiggle with joy!"

I was terrified.

"Honestly, Edith, do I do that?" I gasped. But she did not answer; she only leaned over and kissed Fred.

"Women like men to be awful fools about them," she said. "That's why I'm so crazy about Freddie." He writhed.

"If I tell you something nice, Jack, will you make it a room-size rug?"

"Room size it is."

"Then--Margery's engagement ring was stolen last night and when I commiserated her she said--dear me, the lamp's out and the coffee is cold!"

"Remarkable speech, under the circ.u.mstances," said Fred.

Edith rang the bell and seemed to be thinking. "Perhaps we'd better make it four small rugs instead of one large one," she said.

"Not a rug until you have told me what Margery said," firmly.

"Oh, that! Why, she said it really didn't matter about the ring. She had never cared much about it anyway."

"But that's only a matter of taste," I protested, somewhat disappointed.

But Edith got up and patted me on the top of my head.

"Silly," she said. "If the right man came along and gave her a rubber teething ring, she'd be crazy about it for his sake."

"Edith!" Fred said, shocked. But Edith had gone.

She took me up-stairs before I left for the office to measure for the Shirvan, Edith being a person who believes in obtaining a thing while the desire for it is in its first bloom. Across the hall Fred was talking to Margery through the transom.

"Mustard leaves are mighty helpful," he was saying. "I always take 'em on shipboard. And cheer up: land's in sight."

I would have given much for Fred's ease of manner when, a few minutes later, Edith having decided on four Shirvans and a hall runner, she took me to the door of Margery's room.

She was lying very still and pale in the center of the white bed, and she tried bravely to smile at us.

"I hope you are better," I said. "Don't let Edith convince you that my coffee has poisoned you."

She said she was a little better, and that she didn't know she had had any coffee. That was the extent of the conversation. I, who have a local reputation of a sort before a jury, I could not think of another word to say. I stood there for a minute uneasily, with Edith poking me with her finger to go inside the door and speak and act like an intelligent human being. But I only muttered something about a busy day before me and fled. It was a singular thing, but as I stood in the doorway, I had a vivid mental picture of Edith's description of me, sitting up puppy-like to beg for a kind word, and wiggling with delight when I got it. If I slunk into my office that morning like a dog scourged to his kennel, Edith was responsible.

At the office I found a note from Miss Let.i.tia, and after a glance at it I looked for the first train, in my railroad schedule. The note was brief; unlike the similar epistle I had received from Miss Jane the day she disappeared, this one was very formal.

"MR. JOHN KNOX:

"DEAR SIR--Kindly oblige me by coming to see me as soon as you get this. Some things have happened, not that I think they are worth a row of pins, but Hepsibah is an old fool, and she says she did not put the note in the milk bottle.