"Good gracious!" I gasped. "Do you mean you are guarding the house?"
"Perhaps it's more what you would call surveillance," he said cautiously, "the picture gallery being over your head, Miss, and an easy job from the conservatory roof. We 'aven't told Miss Wyndham, yet, Miss, but the Wimberley Romney was stolen from the Towers last night, Miss, and the whole countryside is up."
"The Romney?" I inquired. "Do you mean a painting?"
"Yes, Miss," he said patiently. "Cut out of its frame, and worth twenty thousand pounds! By a gentlemanly-looking chap—a tourist by appearances, with a bicycle, in tweeds and knickers, Miss."
Whether the bicycle or the tourist wore tweeds and knickers was not entirely clear. Bagsby was saying that the thief was supposed to be hiding on the moor when Daphne came out, and he disappeared.
Poppy Stafford and Ernestine came unexpectedly late that night after I had gone to bed. I was in my first sleep and dreaming that Poppy was braining Bagsby with a gilt-framed painting, and that he was shouting "Votes for Women" instead of "'elp!" when somebody knocked at my door. It turned out to be Poppy, and she said she thought there was a bat in her room, and as she was quite pallid with fright I let her get into my bed. I was full of my dream and I wanted to ask her some particulars about the man she had brained the summer before. But she put her head under the sheet, and as soon as she stopped trembling she went to sleep.
Daphne called me early and we went over to the Hall to take a look around. As Daphne said, it would be night and the grounds would not matter, but we would have to uncover some of the furniture. And as we could not let the servants know, we had to do it ourselves. We took a brush and pan, and tore up a linen sheet to dust with. Bagsby, who had been bribed, and suspected what he wasn't told, got the brush and pan, and later he showed us a pail and a piece of soap in the tonneau.
The place was dreadful. No doubt the park had been lovely, but it was overshadowed and overgrown. The hedges were untrimmed; paths began, wandered around and died in a mess of undergrowth; and the terrace had lost an end in a wilderness where a garden-house was falling to decay. The fading outlines of the kitchen garden seemed to shout aloud of lost domesticity, and over everything lay a sodden layer of the previous autumn's leaves. (For fear I am accused of plagiarism, the sentence about the kitchen garden is not original. Madge.)
Daphne had got a key somewhere, and inside it was worse. Coverings over the pictures and furniture, six years' dust everywhere, and a smell of mould like a crypt of one of the Continental cathedrals, only not so ancestor-y. While we were taking off the covers, with Bagsby's help, Daphne alternately sang and coughed in the dust.
"Why aren't you more cheerful?" she demanded. "It will be a red-letter day for The Cause. When I think of Mabel Fitzjames I almost weep!"