er darkness.

When I reached the floor of the bungalow she was in the open door
panting. Watching her with one eye, I drew back the trap into place and
replaced the rug and the three nails I had loosened. Then I shut the
slide of the lantern and joined her where she stood.

"Do you feel better?" I asked. "It was a dismal quarter of an hour. But
it was not a lost one."

She drew the door to and locked it before she answered; then it was with
a question.

"What do you make of all this, Mr. Trevitt?"

I replied as directly as the circumstances demanded.

"Madam, it is a startling answer to the question you put me before we
first left your house. You asked then if the child in the wagon was
Gwendolen. How could it have been she with this evidence before us of
her having been concealed here at the very time that wagon was being
driven away from--"

"I do not think you have reason enough--" she began and stopped, and did
not speak again till we halted at the foot of her own porch. Then with
the frank accent most in keeping with her general manner, however much I
might distrust both accent and manner, she added as if no interval had
intervened: "If those signs you noted are proofs to you that Gwendolen
was shut up in that walled-off portion of the bungalow while some were
seeking her in the water and others in the wagon, _then where is she
now_?"

XIII

"WE SHALL HAVE TO BEGIN AGAIN"

It was a leading question which I was not surprised to see accompanied
by a very sharp look from beneath the cloudy wrap she had wound about
her head.

"You suspect some one or something," continued Mrs. Carew, with a return
of the indefinable manner which had characterized her in the beginning
of our interview. "Whom? What?"

I should have liked to answer her candidly, and in the spirit, if not
the words, of the prophet of old, but her womanliness disarmed me. With
her eyes on me I could get no further than a polite acknowledgment of
defeat.

"Mrs. Carew, I am all at sea. We shall have to begin again."

"Yes," she answered like an echo--was it sadly or gladly?--"you will
have to begin again." Then with a regretful accent: "And I can not help
you, for I am going to sail to-morrow. I positively must go. Cablegrams
from the other side hurry me. I shall have to leave Mrs. Ocumpaugh in
the midst of her distress."

"What time does your steamer sail, Mrs. Carew?"

"At five o'clock in the afternoon, from the Cunard docks."