"Certainly, if you wish it," she said, ringing the bell.
"Metcalfe, just find out what that disturbance in the street is," she said, when the man appeared, "and come back to report to me."
"I have been out to see already, m'm," Metcalfe answered respectfully. "A man's been stabbed—killed, too. They say he's a brother of Mr. Grant the detective, who lives at No. 10, Taunton Place, and very like him, and that a man who has been hanging about the street all day stabbed him just as he was coming out of No. 10. Why he did it nobody knows, unless the murderer's a criminal that Mr. Grant was after, and stabbed the brother, thinking it was the detective himself. And the worst of it is he's got away, too! But what's that?"
From the back of the house there came a sound that was suspiciously like the stealthy breaking of glass.
It so happens that I have extraordinary sharp hearing, and was able with some exactness to locate the direction whence the sound came.
Calling out "Follow me, Metcalfe!" I dashed down the stairs and through a door which led to a corridor, at the end of which was a conservatory. A cold wind indicated either an open door or window—perhaps a broken window. As I raced along the corridor—the bewildered Metcalfe so far behind me that I could hear his heavy steps descending the stairs—I saw that though all the other plants in the conservatory were perfectly still, one white-blossomed flower in a pot was swaying and moving as if in a draught, and the next moment there peered, through a broken pane of glass behind it, the white and wicked face of the Dumpling.
CHAPTER XIV.
MISS CLARA "SAVES MY LIFE."
One arm was stretched through the broken window towards the conservatory door, which he was trying to unlock; but seeing that someone was approaching he withdrew his arm hurriedly, and the white face that had been peering through the jagged hole in the window-pane disappeared. The next instant I was at the conservatory door, all agog to unfasten it and to give chase, when suddenly, from every part of the building, came the ringing of alarm bells, and, with a sharp click, a bolt upon the conservatory door slid into its place. Clearly Miss Clara had pressed the button of the burglar alarm, thus locking the very door to which my hand was then stretched, and so effectually shutting me in, and a possible housebreaker out. With one twist of my fist I turned the key to which the Dumpling had been directing his attention. Then I tried to slide back the only remaining fastening—the bolt which had been shot into its place by the burglar alarm. It held fast, and cursing Miss Clara, her inventful brother, and his too ingenious burglar box, I tugged at the door with all my strength, but to no purpose. The thing would not budge an inch, and when I snatched up a piece of rockwork from a fernery and bashed desperately at the hateful bolt, I only made matters worse. So far from loosening, the bolt seemed only to set its teeth, bulldogwise, the more tenaciously for my blows. Grinning with rage, and with the strain of concentrating all the strength of my body into my two fists, I threw down the rockwork, with a word I hesitate to repeat, but which Metcalfe, upon whose foot the piece of rockwork fell, had no hesitation in forcibly repeating, what time he limped upon one leg around the conservatory with a grin of pain upon his face more beautiful to behold than the grin which had so recently been upon mine. For the present it was clear that, thanks to Miss Clara and the invention of her resourceful brother, the quarry had escaped me. Long before I could have knocked out sufficient glass to crawl through the conservatory window, long before Miss Clara could have reversed the action of the machine and so released the lock upon the door, the Dumpling would be far away.