“I certainly shall. Martha was killed by the burglar. Did he kidnap Betty?”
“And kill Mr Varian?” Zizi added, and then Granniss returned.
He brought a little cellar floor dust in a paper, and, as Wise had expected, that and the particles he had scraped from the library rug, were indubitably the same.
“Well, then,” Wise remarked, “the burglar came up from the cellar.”
“Where he had been hiding, goodness knows how long!” Rodney exclaimed. “For we locked the house securely before we went upstairs.”
“I think it’s time I took a look at the cellar,” said Wise, and all three started down.
CHAPTER XII
A Letter from Nowhere
Pennington Wise himself assisted in the locking up of the house that night, for he was determined if any more burglars came, he would know how they got in. The money that Minna had in her possession he took charge of, saying he would be responsible for its safety.
Long the detective lay awake in his pleasant bedroom that overlooked the sea. He could hear the great waves tossing and breaking at the foot of the cliff and he couldn’t free his mind from a queer obsession to the effect that those waves held the secret of the mysteries of Headland House.
“It’s too absurd,” he thought to himself in the darkness, “but I do feel that the whole matter is dependent in some way or other on the cliff and the sea.”