ry countenance took on a relieved
expression. But the problem remained.

Suddenly those very words passed some one's lips, and with their
utterance Mr. Upjohn remembered how at an extraordinary crisis in his
own life he had been helped and an equally difficult problem settled,
by a little lady secretly attached to a private detective agency. If she
could only be found and hurried here before morning, all might yet be
well. He would make the effort. Such wild schemes sometimes work. He
telephoned to the office and--

Was there anything else Miss Strange would like to know?

III

Miss Strange, thus appealed to, asked where the gentlemen were now.

She was told that they were still all together in the library; the
ladies had been sent home.

"Then let us go to them," said Violet, hiding under a smile her great
fear that here was an affair which might very easily spell for her that
dismal word, failure.

So great was that fear that under all ordinary circumstances she would
have had no thought for anything else in the short interim between
this stating of the problem and her speedy entrance among the persons
involved. But the circumstances of this case were so far from ordinary,
or rather let me put it in this way, the setting of the case was so very
extraordinary, that she scarcely thought of the problem before her, in
her great interest in the house through whose rambling halls she was
being so carefully guided. So much that was tragic and heartrending had
occurred here. The Van Broecklyn name, the Van Broecklyn history, above
all the Van Broecklyn tradition, which made the house unique in the
country's annals (of which more hereafter), all made an appeal to her
imagination, and centred her thoughts on what she saw about her. There
was door which no man ever opened--had never opened since Revolutionary
times--should she see it? Should she know it if she did see it? Then Mr.
Van Broecklyn himself! just to meet him, under any conditions and in
any place, was an event. But to meet him here, under the pall of his
own mystery! No wonder she had no words for her companions, or that
her thoughts clung to this anticipation in wonder and almost fearsome
delight.

His story was a well-known one. A bachelor and a misanthrope, he lived
absolutely alone save for a large entourage of servants, all men and
elderly ones at that. He never visited. Though he now and then, as on
this occasion, entertained certain persons under his