“Lay off, Betty!” he cried, “that was one below the belt. What do you bet I spot the motive in this mysterious case of Stoker’s?”
“See here, will you pipe down?” Bill expostulated. “All you will spot is your clothes. Keep quiet and quit waving your arms—you nearly upset my coffee. How can any of us learn anything unless you give Stoker a chance to get on with his story?”
Terry suppressed a retort and George hurried into the breach.
“Here goes on the second installment, then,” he said. “And it will probably interest you all to know I’m pretty near the end. Let’s see—where was I?”
“Last fall, at Lawrenceville,” prompted Dorothy. “You couldn’t get your father to come down there.”
George nodded. “Yes, that’s right. He never would come—not even when I graduated last June. I wrote him specially about it, but, well, he was having his own troubles about that time. Before I came home I passed my finals for Princeton. It was on the books that I’d go there this fall.
“Only I didn’t,” continued young Conway rather solemnly. “Father met me at the Bedford station in the flivver when I came back. On the way up here he told me that reverses in business had forced him to sell Hilltop. I knew, of course, that business conditions were pretty bad all over the country. But he looked ill and he had aged terribly since I’d seen him during the Easter holidays. I was much more worried about his physical condition, he seemed so played out, so feeble. But when we drove into the yard and I saw this down-at-the-heels old house—well, I certainly got another shock.”
“It must have been terribly hard,” sympathized Betty. “Especially after living all your life in the big place on the hill.”
“A bit of a comedown,” acknowledged George, “but I don’t want any of you to think I was ashamed of the place. If Father had to live here, it was good enough for me. I felt so sorry for him, though. He’d never been much of a mixer, as I said, but when he did talk to a fellow he was certainly interesting, full of pep and vitality—and a sure hog for work. Now all that was changed. He had no workshop or laboratory here. All day long and half the night he would sit reading in the library across the hall. If I spoke to him, he would answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a question—but never volunteered anything on his own account. He seemed more like a man stunned—a man who realizes his life is a failure and no longer cares to go on.
“The woman down the road who cooks and keeps the house clean told me he had moved in here the early part of April and that during the time before I came back, he had been exactly as I found him.