"He suspects!" Vera told herself, feverishly, as they drove home. "Perhaps--oh, if it only is so! He knows something!"
Back in the empty house, she coaxed her step-mother to bed, and was proceeding to give orders to the charwoman about the tidying-up of the place, when there was a vigorous pull of the bell.
"I will see to it," she said to the woman. Proceeding to the hall-door and opening it, she was confronted with the landlady of the next-door lodging-house--a Mrs. Muggeridge, whose fowls had been harassed by the tortoise-shell cat, after which there had been ructions, and each house had cut its neighbour dead.
"I am sure I don't wish to hurt your feelings, or to intrude, Miss Anerley, but my mind is that troubled I must speak to you," said the old woman, who was stout and asthmatic, and looked pale and "upset." "I hope your poor mar is all right?"
"Yes, thanks! Will you come this way?" said Vera, who felt somewhat as a war-horse hearing the bugle, for she hoped to "hear something," and she conducted her visitor into the little parlour and closed the door.
Mrs. Muggeridge pantingly, with many interpolations, told her tale. She had a country girl as servant, "Sar' Ann, as good a gal as ever lived." Still, it seemed that Sar' Ann was human, and could err. The day after the murder, "as they did call it, and as some calls it now, in spite of that there crowner, Sar' Ann was took with hysterics, and giv' warnin'."
"Which I took. As I says to Sar' Ann, 'I don't want any one 'ere as ain't comfortable.' And she was right down awful, that girl was. One night I took and made 'er tell me what it was, and I'm goin' to tell you, now! For the very mornin' after--I suppose because I told her what she said to me she might have to tell to a Judge and jury, she ran away. She got the milkman to give a lift to her box, and when I got up, expectin' to find the kettle boilin', she was off and away into space--and there she is--like one of them Leonines as they talk of, but we never sees, Miss Anerley! It'll take a detective to find her, if so be as she should be called up to say what she says to me!"
CHAPTER XXVII
Mrs. Muggeridge paused, and had a fit of coughing. Vera waited with the patience which seemed part of her dogged resolve to avenge Victor's death.
"Yes?" she said mildly, as Mrs. Muggeridge wiped her eyes.