nly 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, all made an appeal to her imagination, and centred her
thoughts on what she saw about her. There was a 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 roof, he declined
every invitation for himself, avoiding even, with equal strictness, all
evening amusements of whatever kind, which would detain him in the city
after ten at night. Perhaps this was to ensure no break in his rule of
life never to sleep out of his own bed. Though he was a man well over
fifty he had not spent, according to his own statement, but two nights
out o