“I am not a curious woman,” she put in incisively, “but when my husband spends an evening out, and returns minus his overcoat, with his hat mashed, a lump the size of an egg over his ear, and puts a pair of fire-tongs in the umbrella stand under the impression that it is an umbrella, I have a right to ask at least if he intends to continue his life of debauchery.”
I made a mistake then. I should have told her. Instead, I took my broken hat and jammed it on my head with a force that made the lump she had noticed jump like a toothache, and went out.
When, at noon and luncheon, I tried to tell her the truth, she listened to the end: Then: “I should think you could have done better than that,” she said. “You have had all morning to think it out.”
However, if things were in a state of armed neutrality at home, I had a certain compensation for them when I told my story to Sperry that afternoon.
“You see how it is,” I finished. “You can stay out of this, or come in, Sperry, but I cannot stop now. He was murdered beyond a doubt, and there is an intelligent effort being made to eliminate every particle of evidence.”
He nodded.
“It looks like it. And this man who was there last night—”
“Why a man?”
“He took your overcoat, instead of his own, didn’t he? It may have been—it’s curious, isn’t it, that we’ve had no suggestion of Ellingham in all the rest of the material.”
Like the other members of the Neighborhood Club, he had a copy of the proceedings at the two seances, and now he brought them out and fell to studying them.