“She’s come back!” he cried. “Come back, and never sent me a word. I am glad though.... Hoorah!”
“Come back!” Stella Dean said, drawing herself up stiffly and regarding him with an angry stare. “Who are you talking about?”
“Hester Holt!” Pete Simpkins ejaculated. “She’s just gone into your place. Didn’t you know?”
Miss Dean made no reply. She simply pushed past him and walked in. Vera Cummings, however, dawdled behind.
“What’s Miss Holt like?” she asked anxiously.
Simpkins described her.
“Why that’s the girl I used constantly to see following Stella,” she said. “Where she disappears to is a mystery, but it’s only one of the many funny things that have happened since I’ve been here.”
She then told him about the typewriter and the feet under the table. Pete Simpkins repeated the story to his friends. Rouillac got hold of it, and hence, as the reader already knows, it was handed on to me.
Rouillac was most anxious that I should go with him to the haunted office straightaway, but it so happened that I had work to finish in a given time, and it was therefore arranged that he should call for me one day the following week.
At the hour appointed, he came. “I fear it’s no use,” he said; “the office is closed, and it is impossible to get permission to go there. It’s come about like this. The day after Stella Dean returned to work, Mrs. Bell was away—ill—and the two girls were alone. Some time after they had started work, it might have been eleven o’clock or thereabouts, Vera Cummings got up to get a drink of water, and in passing chanced to look at Stella Dean. The latter was leaning forward in her chair and staring with an expression of the utmost horror in her eyes at a despatch case on the floor, which was oscillating violently to and fro. Vera noticed that the despatch case was marked on one side with the letters ‘H. H.’ ‘That’s odd,’ she cried. ‘What makes it do like that—it can’t be due to vibration, because there’s nothing going by outside. How do you account for it, Stella?’