"Come, I'm going to bed. Good night, Mr. Olden."
"Good night," said Olden, absently. Then he looked up, with an obvious effort to be civil. "Don't think that I have anything against your friend Lawrence or his Irish eyes," he said lightly. "I hope with all my heart that he may be set free,--with all my heart."
"So do I. Good night."
Up in his own room, Lyon's first act was to walk to the window and look across the white expanse of snow to Kittie's windows. The cheerful light answered him, with something of the subtle mischief of Kittie's own solemn air. As he looked, all the lights went out. Miss Elliott's School was wrapped in innocent slumber. Lyon blew a kiss across the night, and then pulled down his own curtain.
He opened Fullerton's strange epistle and studied it again, but the cryptic message remained as cryptic as ever. Pulling out a number of old letters from his own writing case, he compared them with Fullerton's until he found one which corresponded closely, in the blackness of its ink, with Fullerton's. This he laid aside as a standard of comparison. Then he opened the new letter to the air, leaving it where the sun should strike it when it came into the room in the morning. The first point to determine was whether the letter had actually been written by Fullerton before his death, or whether someone still living was carrying out the dead man's sinister wishes.
[CHAPTER XIV]
Fullerton, like a number of other lawyers in Waynscott, had had his office in the Equity Building, and Lyon made it convenient, in the course of his morning's tramp for news the next day, to visit the Equity. As he expected, he found Fullerton's office locked, but he hunted up the manager of the building, and persuaded him to unlock it for him. Perhaps the fact that he was a personal friend made a difference in his willingness, though he pretended to protest at what he called the morbid sensationalism of the press.
"What do you expect to get out of his empty rooms?" he asked.
"I'm working up a story," said Lyon carelessly. "I want to see what I can get in the way of personal idiosyncrasies."
The suite consisted of three rooms,--a large reception room, one side of which was covered with book-cases; a private office at the back; and, adjoining this, a room for the use of a stenographer, as was evident from the typewriter beside the window. There was so little furniture in this room that Lyon saw it could be dismissed in the special inquiry which he had in mind. In the private office a large flat desk occupied the center of the room.