“Did they easily find their way into the bricked-up room?” asked Emmie, who knew of no way of access into it but by the secret staircase.
“Bless you, miss, what could be easier, when the door was wide open ’twixt that room and Master Bruce’s!”
Emmie started, and turned deadly pale.
“You may well start with surprise, miss; all of us were astonished to find there was any door in that wall. Lizzie declares that even she never knew that there was one, though she tidies the room every day. Master Bruce was so sly—he was—hanging the big map over the place!”
“How dare you speak thus of my brother?” cried Emmie.
“It ain’t my speaking, but every one’s speaking,” said Hannah, firing up at the word of rebuke. “The police say as how young master could not have slept in the one room for a month, and have been innocent as a babe of what was going on in the other. Ay, they said that of him, Miss Trevor, before they’d found a lot of the odd kind of paper of which bank-notes are made in one of his drawers. I wonder young master did not throw it all into the fire before he absconded.”
Emmie pressed her temples with both her icy cold hands. Her brain was reeling. Half unconsciously, she echoed the word “Absconded!”
“That’s what the p’lice called it; and they’re going to take out a warrant against Master Bruce,” said Hannah. “It’s plain he went off last night, for his bed had never been slept in.”
This was to Emmie the crowning horror. There had been a door then—an open door—between her brother’s room and that haunted by the presence of the unscrupulous Harper; and Bruce—the noble, the brave—had disappeared during the night!
“Leave me, leave me!” cried Emmie wildly; and, alarmed at the lady’s ghastly looks, the bearer of evil tidings at once obeyed her command. Hannah had said more than enough, and now retreated in alarm, lest the effect of her words should have been to turn her young mistress’s brain.