Oliver settled himself comfortably beside a window, opened his book, but did not immediately begin to read. His eyes wandered about the perfectly appointed room, stared out at the moonlit garden, and then came back to his sister.
"Why aren't we happy here, Janet?" he questioned. "It seems as though we had everything to make us so."
"Because he isn't happy," returned his sister, with a gesture toward the study where Cousin Jasper, distraught, worried, and forlorn, must even then be sitting alone.
"But why isn't he happy? There is everything here that he could wish for." Oliver added somewhat bitterly, after a pause: "Why don't grown-up people tell us things? It is miserable to be old enough to notice when affairs go wrong but not to be old enough to have them explained."
"Perhaps," said Janet hopefully, "we will be able to prove that we deserve to know. I think that you will, anyway, and then you can tell me."
It was not only the younger members of the household who were struggling with mystery that night, however. Before they had been reading many minutes, there came a discreet tap at the door and Hotchkiss appeared upon the threshold. Oliver was wondering what a boy unused to butlers was supposed to say or do on the occasion of such a visit, and even Janet, better at guessing the etiquette of such matters, seemed at a loss. And so also was Hotchkiss, as it presently began to be evident.
If the butler had been of the regulation variety, he might perhaps have known how to ask a few respectful questions without a change of his professional countenance and have gained his information without betraying its significance. But as it was, he had for the moment put off the wooden, expressionless face that he was supposed to wear at his work, and was openly anxious and disturbed.
"We're troubled about Mr. Peyton, Mrs. Brown and I," he began, coming frankly to the point at once. "He had a queer visitor to-day, one who has just been coming lately and who always leaves him upset. I wonder if you saw him, a thin man with a brown face and a kind of a way with him, somehow, in spite of his bad clothes."
"Did he drive a shambling old horse?" inquired Oliver, remembering suddenly the person he had noticed on the road, "and a wagon that rattled as though it were twenty years old? Yes, we both saw him."
"Had you ever seen him before?" Hotchkiss asked eagerly, and seemed disappointed when Oliver replied: