“Have you had offers for it?”
“None that we regarded as satisfactory; it was too large a property to appeal to the average man in the market for a country home, as it consisted of more than eighty acres and a house of twenty-four rooms. On the afternoon of the nineteenth of June, 1926, however, I showed the photographs of the house to a gentleman from Cleveland who was about to transfer his business to the East. He was delighted with them and made no quibble about the price if the property proved to be all that it seemed.”
“You were in New York at this time?”
“Yes; and a dinner engagement there prevented me from taking him out to Rosemont that afternoon. He was extremely anxious, however, to see it as soon as possible, as he was leaving for the West the following afternoon. So I arranged to take him next morning at nine o’clock.”
“And did so?”
“And did so.”
“Now will you be good enough to tell us, Mr. Conroy, just what happened when you arrived with this gentleman at Orchards on the morning of the twentieth?”
“We drove out from New York in my roadster, arriving at the lodge gates of the property shortly after nine o’clock, I should say. I was to collect the keys under the doormat at the gardener’s cottage, which was halfway between the lodge and the main house——”
“Just a moment, Mr. Conroy. Was the lodge occupied?”
“No; at this particular time no building on the place was occupied. In Mr. Curtiss Thorne’s day, the lodge was occupied by the chauffeur and his family, the gardener’s cottage by the gardener and his family, and there was another cottage used by a farmer on the extreme western boundary. None of these had been occupied for some time, with the exception of the gardener’s cottage, whose occupants had been given a vacation of two months in order to visit their aged parents in Italy. Shall I go on?”