"What in the world do you mean?" gasped Lyon. "The curtain--" He tore himself away and rushed upstairs to his window. Kittie's curtain was down to the very bottom in the left hand window. "Gone!" he exclaimed, in blank bewilderment.
Olden had followed close.
"She pulled the curtain down just now,--just before you came in. I was watching,--I have been watching all the time,--I saw her come and pull it down."
"How did you know about the curtains?" asked Lyon, realizing for the first time that Olden was betraying knowledge that he was not supposed to have.
"I heard what you said at the 'phone. I knew what you came here for, of course,--that's why I let you come,--you were to help me watch without knowing it,--and now she has gone,--slipped away before our very eyes,--"
"Who are you?"
"Woods Broughton." He pronounced the name with careless impatience, as though he had never tried to keep it a secret. "What are you going to do? We must find her."
"Come downstairs," said Lyon, adjusting himself to the new situation. "We must telephone to Howell."
Howell was not an imaginative man, and it took some time to make him grasp the double idea that Mrs. Broughton had disappeared and that Lyon's landlord had suddenly turned out to be Broughton himself. The whole thing was irregular, and he felt himself confused and embarrassed. But he agreed that he must come at once for a consultation.
"I think we shall get along better if we are quite frank," said Lyon, while they were waiting for Howell. "Will you explain your object in disguising yourself, so that we may know just where we stand in relation to each other?"