The surprise I expressed at this bold attempt at ingenuousness was better simulated than his, I hope.
“You don’t know!” I exclaimed. “Can you live directly opposite a place of such remarkable associations and not interest yourself in who goes in and out of its deserted doors?”
“I don’t sit in my front window,” he peevishly returned.
I let my eye roam toward a chair standing suspiciously near the very window he had designated.
“But you saw the light?” I suggested.
“I saw that from the door-step when I went out to give Rudge his usual five minutes’ breathing spell on the stoop. But you have not answered my question; whom do you mean by she?”
“Veronica Jeffrey,” I replied. “She who was Veronica Moore. She has visited this haunted house of hers for the last time.”
“Last time!” Either he could not or would not understand me.
“What has happened to my niece?” he cried, rising with an energy that displaced the great dog and sent him, with hanging head and trailing tail, to his own special sleeping-place under the table. “Has she run upon a ghost in those dismal apartments? You interest me greatly. I did not think she would ever have the pluck to visit this house again after what happened at her wedding.”
“She has had the pluck,” I assured him; “and what is more, she has had enough of it not only to reenter the house, but to reenter it alone. At least, such is the present inference. Had you been blessed with more curiosity and made more frequent use of the chair so conveniently placed for viewing the opposite house, you might have been in a position to correct this inference. It would help the police materially to know positively that she had no companion in her fatal visit.”