om, and
it has no bolt--only a key. That kind of a lock is only a three-minutes
delay, or less. Now then, Miss Maitland was a light sleeper. When she
wakened she was too alarmed to scream; she tried to get to the door and
was intercepted. Finally she got out the way the intruder got in, and
ran along the hall. Every door was locked. In a frenzy she ran up the
attic stairs and was captured up there. Which bears out Miss Margery's
story of the footsteps back and forward."

"Good heavens, what an awful thing!" I gasped. "And I was sitting
smoking just across the hall."

"He brings her down the stairs again, probably half dragging her. Once,
she catches hold of the stair rail, and holds desperately to it, leaving
the stain here."

"But why did he bring her down?" I asked bewildered. "Why wouldn't he
take what he was after and get away?"

Hunter smoked and meditated.

"She probably had to get the key of the iron door," he suggested. "It
was hidden, and time was valuable. If there was a scapegrace member of
the family, for instance, who knew where the old lady kept money, and
who needed it badly; who knew all about the house, and who--"

"Fleming!" I exclaimed, aghast.

"Or even our young friend, Wardrop," Hunter said quietly. "He has an
hour to account for. The trying to get in may have been a blind, and how
do you know that what he says was stolen out of his satchel was not what
he had just got from the iron box over the mantel in Miss Maitland's
room?"

I was dizzy with trying to follow Hunter's facile imagination. The thing
we were trying to do was to find the old lady, and, after all, here we
brought up against the same _impasse_.

"Then where is she now?" I asked. He meditated. He had sat down on the
narrow stairs, and was rubbing his chin with a thoughtful forefinger.
"One-thirty, Miss Margery says, when she heard the noise. One-forty-five
when you heard Wardrop at the shutters. I tell you, Knox, it is one of
two things: either that woman is dead somewhere in this house, or she
ran out of the hall door just before you went down-stairs, and in that
case the Lord only knows where she is. If there is a room anywhere that
we have not explored--"

"I am inclined to think there is," I broke in, thinking of Wardrop's
face a few minutes before. And just then Wardrop himself joined us. He
closed the door at the foot of the boxed-in staircase, and came quietly
up.

"You spoke about an unused room or a secret close