Whatever happened! The thought struck me like a knell. What could happen but her arrest and trial?
But as I went out of my own door—I left the house early, for I couldn't face Aunt Lucy and Winnie—I suddenly decided it would be better to see Stone first and learn if anything had transpired since I left him.
I rang the bell at Vicky Van's house with a terrible feeling of impending disaster, that might be worse than any yet known.
Fibsy let me in. I wanted to hate that boy and yet his very evident adoration of Ruth Schuyler made me love him. I knew all that he had discovered had been as iron entering his soul, but his duty led him on and he dared not pause or falter.
"We may as well tell him," he said to Stone, and the detective nodded.
"But come downstairs with us and have a cup of coffee first," Stone said; "you'll need it, as you say you've had no breakfast. Fibsy makes first-rate coffee, and I can tell you, Calhoun, you've a hard day before you."
"Have you learned anything further?" I managed to stammer out as we went down to the basement room that they used as a dining-room now.
"Yes; as I told you, walls have tongues, and the walls have given up the secret of how Mrs. Schuyler managed her two-sided existence."
But he would not tell me the secret until I had been fortified with two cups of steaming Mocha, which fully justified his praise of Fibsy's culinary prowess.
Fibsy himself said nothing beyond a brief "good morning," and the lad's eyes were red and his voice shook as he spoke.