t, Mr. Hunter," he
said, without any resentment in his tone. "We have nothing so
sensational as that, but the old house is full of queer nooks and
crannies, and perhaps, in one of them, we might find--" he stopped and
gulped. Whatever Hunter might think, whatever I might have against Harry
Wardrop, I determined then that he had had absolutely nothing to do with
little Miss Maitland's strange disappearance.

The first place we explored was a closed and walled-in wine-cellar, long
unused, and to which access was gained by a small window in the stone
foundation of the house. The cobwebs over the window made it practically
an impossible place, but we put Robert, the gardener, through it, in
spite of his protests.

"There's nothin' there, I tell you," he protested, with one leg over the
coping. "God only knows what's down there, after all these years. I've
been livin' here with the Miss Maitlands for twenty year, and I ain't
never been put to goin' down into cellars on the end of a rope."

He went, because we were three to his one, but he was up again in sixty
seconds, with the announcement that the place was as bare as the top of
his head.

We moved every trunk in the store-room, although it would have been a
moral impossibility for any one to have done it the night before without
rousing the entire family, and were thus able to get to and open a large
closet, which proved to contain neatly tied and labeled packages of
religious weeklies, beginning in the sixties.

The grounds had been gone over inch by inch, without affording any clue,
and now the three of us faced one another. The day was almost gone, and
we were exactly where we started. Hunter had sent men through the town
and the adjacent countryside, but no word had come from them. Miss
Letitia had at last succumbed to the suspense and had gone to bed, where
she lay quietly enough, as is the way with the old, but so mild that she
was alarming.

At five o'clock Hawes called me up from the office and almost tearfully
implored me to come back and attend to my business. When I said it was
impossible, I could hear him groan as he hung up the receiver. Hawes is
of the opinion that by keeping fresh magazines in my waiting-room and by
persuading me to the extravagance of Turkish rugs, that he has built my
practice to its present flourishing state. When I left the telephone,
Hunter was preparing to go back to town and Wardrop was walking up and
down the hall. Suddenly W