It was ten o'clock that morning when Hutchinson Hatch called on Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen--The Thinking Machine. The reporter's face was still white, showing that he had slept little, if at all. The Thinking Machine squinted at him a moment through his thick glasses, then dropped into a chair.
"Well?" he queried.
"I'm almost ashamed to come to you, Professor," Hatch confessed, after a minute, and there was a little embarrassed hesitation in his speech. "It's another mystery."
"Sit down and tell me about it."
Hatch took a seat opposite the scientist.
"I've been frightened," he said at last, with a sheepish grin; "horribly, awfully frightened. I came to you to know what frightened me."
"Dear me! Dear me!" exclaimed The Thinking Machine. "What is it?"
Then Hatch told him from the beginning the story of the haunted house as he knew it; how he had examined the house by daylight, just what he had found, the story of the old murder and the jewels, the fact that Ernest Weston was to be married. The scientist listened attentively.
"It was nine o'clock that night when I went to the house the second time," said Hatch. "I went prepared for something, but not for what I saw."
"Well, go on," said the other, irritably.