"come back here. Whose bag is this?"

He stopped then, but he did not turn around.

"It's--it belongs to Thomas," he said, and fled up the drive.

To Thomas! A London bag with mirrors and cosmetic jars of which Thomas
could not even have guessed the use! However, I put the bag in the
back of my mind, which was fast becoming stored with anomalous and
apparently irreconcilable facts, and followed Warner to the house.

Liddy had come back to the kitchen: the door to the basement stairs was
double-barred, and had a table pushed against it; and beside her on the
table was most of the kitchen paraphernalia.

"Did you see if there was any one missing in the house?" I asked,
ignoring the array of sauce-pans rolling-pins, and the poker of the
range.

"Rosie is missing," Liddy said with unction. She had objected to
Rosie, the parlor maid, from the start. "Mrs. Watson went into her
room, and found she had gone without her hat. People that trust
themselves a dozen miles from the city, in strange houses, with
servants they don't know, needn't be surprised if they wake up some
morning and find their throats cut."

After which carefully veiled sarcasm Liddy relapsed into gloom. Warner
came in then with a handful of small tools, and Mr. Jamieson went with
him to the basement. Oddly enough, I was not alarmed. With all my
heart I wished for Halsey, but I was not frightened. At the door he
was to force, Warner put down his tools and looked at it. Then he
turned the handle. Without the slightest difficulty the door opened,
revealing the blackness of the drying-room beyond!

Mr. Jamieson gave an exclamation of disgust.

"Gone!" he said. "Confound such careless work! I might have known."

It was true enough. We got the lights on finally and looked all
through the three rooms that constituted this wing of the basement.
Everything was quiet and empty. An explanation of how the fugitive had
escaped injury was found in a heaped-up basket of clothes under the
chute. The basket had been overturned, but that was all. Mr. Jamieson
examined the windows: one was unlocked, and offered an easy escape.
The window or the door? Which way had the fugitive escaped? The door
seemed most probable, and I hoped it had been so. I could not have
borne, just then, to think that it was my poor Gertrude we had been
hounding through the darkness, and yet--I had met Gertrude not far from
that very window.

I went up-stairs at last, tire