ly person, Mr. Knox, who could not sleep last
night," she went on. "Oh, I know a great many things. I know about the
pearls, and what you think about them, and I know more than that, I--"

She stopped then. She had said more than she intended to, and all at
once her bravado left her, and she looked like a frightened child. I
went over to her and took one trembling hand.

"I wish you didn't know all those things," I said. "But since you do,
won't you let me share the burden? The only reason I am still here
is--on your account."

I had a sort of crazy desire to take her in my arms and comfort her,
Wardrop or no Wardrop. But at that moment, luckily for me, perhaps, Miss
Letitia's shrill old voice came from the stairway.

"Get out of my way, Heppie," she was saying tartly. "I'm not on my
death-bed yet, not if I know it. Where's Knox?"

Whereupon I obediently went out and helped Miss Letitia into the room.

"I think I know where Jane is," she said, putting down her cane with a
jerk. "I don't know why I didn't think about it before. She's gone to
get her new teeth; she's been talkin' of it for a month. Not but what
her old teeth would have done well enough."

"She would hardly go in the middle of the night," I returned. "She was a
very timid woman, wasn't she?"

"She wasn't raised right," Miss Letitia said with a shake of her head.
"She's the baby, and the youngest's always spoiled."

"Have you thought that this might be more than it appears to be?" I was
feeling my way: she was a very old woman. "It--for instance, it might be
abduction, kidnapping--for a ransom."

"Ransom!" Miss Letitia snapped. "Mr. Knox, my father made his money by
working hard for it: I haven't wasted it--not that I know of. And if
Jane Maitland was fool enough to be abducted, she'll stay a while before
I pay anything for her. It looks to me as if this detective business was
going to be expensive, anyhow."

My excuse for dwelling with such attention to detail on the preliminary
story, the disappearance of Miss Jane Maitland and the peculiar
circumstances surrounding it, will have to find its justification in the
events that followed it. Miss Jane herself, and the solution of that
mystery, solved the even more tragic one in which we were about to be
involved. I say _we_, because it was borne in on me at about that time,
that the things that concerned Margery Fleming must concern me
henceforth, whether I willed it so or otherwise. For the first