“Oh, Norah! come off! desist! let up! Next thing you know you’ll be having him in the movies! For you never thought up all that stuff without getting hints for it from some slapstick melodrama!”
“Oh, well, people who are absolutely without imagination can’t expect to see into a mystery! But, you won’t see any Mr. Rivers this morning,—I can assure you of that!”
She turned to her typewriter, and I took up my telephone.
I could not get Rivers at his home address, and I next called up Miss Raynor.
She replied, in agitated tones, that Rivers had been to see her for a few minutes, and that he had left half an hour before. She begged me to come around at once.
Of course, I went.
I found her in a strange state of mind. She seemed like one who had made a discovery, and was fearful of inadvertently disclosing it.
But when I urged her to be frank, she insisted she had nothing to conceal.
“I don’t know anything, Mr. Brice, truly I don’t,” she repeated. “I mean, anything new or anything that I haven’t told you. Mr. Rivers was here this morning for a very short call. He said that while his memory had not returned, he had a queer mental impression of being on a search for a paper when he fell through the earth.”
“Did he go down into the earth to seek the paper?” I asked, thinking it best to treat the matter lightly.