“Yes. I was trying to recollect precisely what it was that caused us to move from the summerhouse. I think that it was Miss Dunne who suggested that it was rather close and stuffy there, because of the fact that the structure was smothered in vines; she asked if there wasn’t somewhere cooler that we could go to sit. I said: ‘There’s the gardener’s cottage. We might try the veranda there.’ You could just see the roof of it through the trees. I pointed it out to her, and we started——”
“You were familiar with the layout of the estate?”
“Oh, quite. That was one of the principal reasons why we had gone there. I had once done some tutoring in Latin and physics with Mr. Thorne’s younger son Charles—the one who was killed in the war. We had been in the habit of using the summerhouse, which was his old playhouse, as a schoolroom.”
“That was some time ago?”
“About fifteen years ago—sixteen perhaps. I had just graduated from college myself, and Charles Thorne was going to Princeton that fall.”
“But you still remembered your way about?”
“Oh, perfectly. I was about to say that we did not approach it from the main drive, but cut across the lawns, pushed through the shrubbery at the back and came up to it from the rear. We had just reached the little dirt drive back of the cottage, and were perhaps a hundred feet away from the house itself, when we heard voices, and Miss Dunne exclaimed: ‘There’s someone in the cottage. Look, the side window is lighted.’ I was considerably startled, as I had made inquiries about the gardener and knew that he was in Italy.
“I stood still for a moment, debating what to do next, when one of the voices in the cottage was suddenly raised, and a woman said quite clearly, ‘You wouldn’t dare to touch me—you wouldn’t dare!’ Someone laughed and there was a little scuffling sound, and a second or so after that a scream—a short, sharp scream—and the sound of something falling with quite a clatter, as though a chair or a table had been overturned.
“I was in rather a nervous and overwrought state of mind myself that evening, and before I thought what I was doing I laughed, quite loudly. Miss Dunne whispered, ‘Be careful! They’ll hear you.’ Just as she spoke, the light went out in the cottage and I said, ‘Well, Sally, evidently we aren’t the only indiscreet people around here this evening. I’d better get you out of this.’
“Just as I was speaking I heard steps on the main driveway and the sound of someone whistling. The whistling kept coming closer every second, and I whispered, ‘Someone’s coming in here. We’d better stand back in those bushes by the house.’ There were some very tall lilacs at the side of the house under the windows, and we tiptoed over and pushed back into them. After a minute or so, we heard someone go up the steps, and then a bell rang inside the house. There wasn’t any sound at all for a minute; then we could hear the steps coming down the porch stairs again, and a moment later heard them on the gravel, and a moment later still they had died away.