Then I turned around, and, of course, there was Aunt Selina with her eyes protruding until you could have knocked them off with a stick, and beside her, very red and uncomfortable, Mr. Harbison!

"Bella!" she said in a shocked voice, "is that the way you speak to your husband! It is high time I came here, I think, and took a hand in this affair."

"Oh, never mind, Aunt Selina," Jim said, with a sheepish grin.

"Kit--Bella is tired and nervous. This is a h--deuce of a situation.

No--er--servants, and all that."

But Aunt Selina did mind, and showed it. She pulled the unlucky Harbison man through the door and closed it, and then stood glaring at both of us.

"Every little quarrel is an apple knocked from the tree of love," she announced oratorically.

"This was a very little quarrel," Jim said, edging toward the door; "a--a green apple, Aunt Selina, a colicky little green apple." But she was not to be diverted.

"Bella," she said severely, "you said you loathed him. You didn't mean that."

"But I do!" I cried hysterically. "There isn't any word to tell how I--how I detest him."

Then I swept past them all and flew to Bella's dressing room and locked myself in. Aunt Selina knocked until she was tired, then gave up and went to bed.

That was the night Anne Brown's pearl collar was stolen!

Chapter VI. A MIGHTY POOR JOKE

Of course, one knows that there are people who in a different grade of society would be shoplifters and pickpockets. When they are restrained by obligation or environment they become a little overkeen at bridge, or take the wrong sables, or stuff a gold-backed brush into a m.u.f.f at a reception. You remember the ivory dressing set that Theodora Bucknell had, fastened with fine gold chains? And the sensation it caused at the Bucknell cotillion when Mrs. Van Zire went sweeping to her carriage with two feet of gold chain hanging from the front of her wrap?

But Anne's pearl collar was different. In the first place, instead of three or four hundred people, the suspicion had to be divided among ten.

And of those ten, at least eight of us were friends, and the other two had been vouched for by the Browns and Jimmy. It was a horrible mix-up.

For the necklace was gone--there couldn't be any doubt of that--and although, as Dallas said, it couldn't get out of the house, still, there were plenty of places to hide the thing.

The worst of our trouble really originated with Max Reed, after all.

For it was Max who made the silly wager over the telephone, with d.i.c.k Bagley. He bet five hundred even that one of us, at least, would break quarantine within the next twenty-four hours, and, of course, that settled it. d.i.c.k told it around the club as a joke, and a man who owns a newspaper heard him and called up the paper. Then the paper called up the health office, after setting up a flaming scare-head, "Will Money Free Them? Board of Health versus Millionaire."

It was almost three when the house settled down--n.o.body had any night clothes, although finally, through Dallas, who gave them to Anne, who gave them to the rest, we got some things of Jimmy's--and I was still dressed. The house was perfectly quiet, and, after listening carefully, I went slowly down the stairs. There was a light in the hall, and another back in the dining room, and I got along without any trouble.

But the pantry, where the stairs led down, was dark, and the wretched swinging door would not stay open.

I caught my skirt in the door as I went through, and I had to stop to loosen it. And in that awful minute I heard some one breathing just beside me. I had stooped to my gown, and I turned my head without straightening--I couldn't have raised myself to an erect posture, for my knees were giving way under me--and just at my feet lay the still glowing end of a match!

I had to swallow twice before I could speak. Then I said sharply:

"Who's there?"

The man was so close it is a wonder I had not walked into him; his voice was right at my ear.

"I am sorry I startled you," he said quietly. "I was afraid to speak suddenly, or move, for fear I would do--what I have done."

It was Mr. Harbison.

"I--I thought you were--it is very late," I managed to say, with dry lips. "Do you know where the electric switch is?"

"Mrs. Wilson!" It was clear he had not known me before. "Why, no; don't you?"

"I am all confused," I muttered, and beat a retreat into the dining room. There, in the friendly light, we could at least see each other, and I think he was as much impressed by the fact that I had not undressed as I was by the fact that he HAD, partly. He wore a hideous dressing gown of Jimmy's, much too small, and his hair, parted and plastered down in the early evening, stood up in a sort of brown brush all over his head. He was trying to flatten it with his hands.

"It must be three o'clock," he said, with polite surprise, "and the house is like a barn. You ought not to be running around with your arms uncovered, Mrs. Wilson. Surely you could have called some of us."

"I didn't wish to disturb any one," I said, with distinct truth.

"I suppose you are like me," he said. "The novelty of the situation--and everything. I got to thinking things over, and then I realized the studio was getting cold, so I thought I would come down and take a look at the furnace. I didn't suppose any one else would think of it. But I lost myself in that pantry, stumbled against a half-open drawer, and nearly went down the dumb-waiter." And, as if in judgment on me, at that instant came two rather terrific thumps from somewhere below, and inarticulate words, shouted rather than spoken. It was uncanny, of course, coming as it did through the register at our feet. Mr. Harbison looked startled.

"Oh, by the way," I said, as carelessly as I could. "In the excitement, I forgot to mention it. There is a policeman asleep in the furnace room.

I--I suppose we will have to keep him now," I finished as airily as possible.

"Oh, a policeman--in the cellar," he repeated, staring at me, and he moved toward the pantry door.

"You needn't go down," I said feverishly, with visions of Bella Knowles sitting on the kitchen table, surrounded by soiled dishes and all the cheerless aftermath of a dinner party. "Please don't go down. I--it's one of my rules--never to let a stranger go down to the kitchen. I--I'm peculiar--that way--and besides, it's--it's mussy."

Bang! Crash! through the register pipe, and some language quite articulate. Then silence.

"Look here, Mrs. Wilson," he said resolutely. "What do I care about the kitchen? I'm going down and arrest that policeman for disturbing the peace. He will have the pipes down."

"You must not go," I said with desperate firmness. "He--he is probably in a very dangerous state just now. We--I--locked him in."

The Harbison man grinned and then became serious.

"Why don't you tell me the whole thing?" he demanded. "You've been in trouble all evening, and--you can trust me, you know, because I am a stranger; because the minute this crazy quarantine is raised I am off to the Argentine Republic," (perhaps he said Chili) "and because I don't know anything at all about you. You see, I have to believe what you tell me, having no personal knowledge of any of you to go on. Now tell me--whom have you hidden in the cellar, besides the policeman?"

There was no use trying to deceive him; he was looking straight into my eyes. So I decided to make the best of a bad thing. Anyhow, it was going to require strength to get Bella through the coal hole with one arm and restrain the policeman with the other.

"Come," I said, making a sudden resolution, and led the way down the stairs.

He said nothing when he saw Bella, for which I was grateful. She was sitting at the table, with her arms in front of her, and her head buried in them. And then I saw she was asleep. Her hat and veil were laid beside her, and she had taken off her coat and draped it around her. She had rummaged out a cold pheasant and some salad, and had evidently had a little supper. Supper and a nap, while I worried myself gray-headed about her!

"She--she came in unexpectedly--something about the butler," I explained under my breath. "And--she doesn't want to stay. She is on bad terms with--with some of the people upstairs. You can see how impossible the situation is."

"I doubt if we can get her out," he said, as if the situation were quite ordinary. "However, we can try. She seems very comfortable. It's a pity to rouse her."

Here the prisoner in the furnace room broke out afresh. It sounded as though he had taken a lump of coal and was attacking the lock. Mr.

Harbison followed the noise, and I could hear him arguing, not gently.

"Another sound," he finished, "and you won't get out of here at all, unless you crawl up the furnace pipe!"

When he came back, Bella was rousing. She lifted her head with her eyes shut and then opened them one at a time, blinked, and sat up. She didn't see him at first.

"You wretch!" she said ungratefully, after she had yawned. "Do you know what time it is? And that--" Then she saw Mr. Harbison and sat staring at him.

"This is Mr. Harbison," I said to her hastily. "He--he came with Anne and Dal and--he is shut in, too."