indows. He
wished Isabel could see him and know that for once the routine of his
life had been interrupted only to find him resourceful and the easy
master of his fate.

He made a point of washing the dishes and cooking utensils and putting
them carefully away. These matters attended to, he roamed over the house
which now had a new interest for him since the Congdon family skeleton
had come out of its closet and danced round the dinner table. In one way
and another he found it possible to make a fair acquaintance with the
late inmates of the house. In a bedroom adjoining the nursery there
were books in abundance, and very good books they were--essays, poetry,
a few of those novels that appeal only to sophisticated readers, and
children's books, including a volume of Bible stories retold for the
young. He could readily imagine Mrs. Congdon reading aloud from these
volumes to her youngsters as they stood beside the wicker rocker in the
bay-window. Only a few hours earlier the house had rung with the happy
laughter of children; he fancied he could hear them calling to their
mother up the stair. Mrs. Congdon was a blonde, he decided, from the
presence in a closet of a blue peignoir overlooked in her flight and a
bolt of blue ribbon that had rolled under the bed as though seeking
refuge from the general confusion.

In the adjoining room he sought traces of the hard-hearted husband, but
in his departure, presumably sometime earlier, Congdon had made a clean
sweep; there was nothing to afford a clue to his character beyond a
four-in-hand tie whose colors struck Archie as execrable. Below in the
snuggery fitted up for masculine use was a table, containing a humidor
half filled with dried-up cigars, and an ill-smelling pipe--Archie hated
pipes--and a box of cigarettes. A number of scientific magazines lay
about and a forbidding array of books on mechanics and chemistry
overflowed the shelves. He threw open a cabinet filled with blue prints
illustrating queer mechanical contrivances. They struck him as very
silly and he slammed the thing shut in disgust, convinced that Congdon
was a crank, or he wouldn't have indulged in such foolishness. In a
drawer of the desk was an automatic pistol and a box of cartridges. At
a country house where he once week-ended a burglar scare had inspired
feverish intensive pistol practice among the guests and Archie had
learned to load and fire and even developed some skill as a marksman.
There were