It was Mrs. Macalister, dishevelled and in white, who stood over him.
“This is really a bit too thick,” he thought vaguely and sleepily, regretting his impulsive flirtation of the previous evening. Then he collected himself and said sternly, severely, that if Mrs. Macalister would retire to the corridor, he would follow in a moment; he added that she might leave the door open if she felt afraid. Mrs. Macalister retired, sobbing, and Cecil arose. He went first to consult his watch; it was gone—a chronometer worth a couple of hundred pounds. He whistled, climbed on to a chair, and discovered that his pocket-book was no longer in a place of safety on the top of the wardrobe; it had contained something over five hundred pounds in a highly negotiable form. Picking up his overcoat, which lay on the floor, he found that the fur lining—a millionaire’s fancy, which had cost him nearly a hundred and fifty pounds—had been cut away, and was no more to be seen. Even the revolver had departed from under his pillow!
“Well!” he murmured, “this is decidedly the grand manner.”
Quite suddenly it occurred to him, as he noticed a peculiar taste in his mouth, that the whisky-and-soda had contained more than whisky-and-soda—he had been drugged! He tried to recall the face of the waiter who had served him. Eyeing the window and the door, he argued that the thief had entered by the former and departed by the latter. “But the pocket-book!” he mused. “I must have been watched!”
Mrs. Macalister, stripped now of all dash and all daring, could be heard in the corridor.
“Can she——?” He speculated for a moment, and then decided positively in the negative. Mrs. Macalister could have no design on anything but a bachelor’s freedom.
He assumed his dressing-gown and slippers and went to her. The corridor was in darkness, but she stood in the light of his doorway.
“Now,” he said, “this ghost of yours, dear lady!”
“You must go first,” she whimpered. “I daren’t. It was white ... but with a black face. It was at the window.”
Cecil, getting a candle, obeyed. And having penetrated alone into the lady’s chamber, he perceived, to begin with, that a pane had been pushed out of the window by the old, noiseless device of a sheet of treacled paper, and then, examining the window more closely, he saw that, outside, a silk ladder depended from the roof and trailed in the balcony.