The medical examiner wheeled suddenly on him. “Oh, come, come,” he said, “get out. You make me tired. You know too much altogether. There’s one thing you don’t know, though. That I’m busy sometimes—even too busy to listen to you and your ‘funny things,’ as you call them. Now, get out.”
The reporter was on the farther side of the threshold now. He paused for one parting shot. “I’ll bet you a dollar,” he said, “that things don’t stop here for good. I’ll bet you a dollar—I’ll bet you five—that some day we hear of this case again.”
There was no response. He waited a moment in silence. And then the door at last closed behind him.
CHAPTER XIII
VAUGHAN DOUBTS
“Truth is the highest thing that man may keep.”
Chaucer.
Once again the household at The Birches had settled down into its wonted routine of daily life. Yet with a difference, too, for over the whole place the shadow of the tragedy still hung. Henry Carleton, deeply affected at the loss of a faithful and valued servant, showed his sorrow by making no attempt to replace him, letting the motor lie idle, and promoting Saunders, the former groom, to the coachman’s vacant post. Mrs. Satterlee herself, very pretty and very sad in deepest black, continued to live alone at the cottage, going out but seldom and seemingly well-nigh inconsolable in her grief. Just once, Rose Carleton, feeling vaguely repulsed in the visit or two she had made to her one time nurse, had gone to her father’s study to question him in regard to the widow’s position. “Is it quite proper, father,” she had asked, “for her to live there now, all alone? Don’t you think people may begin to talk ill-naturedly about her?”