It was Edith who brought Mrs. Butler to my mind. Fred had maintained that she had fled before the intruders, and was probably in some closet or corner of the upper floor. I am afraid our solicitude was long in coming. It was almost an hour before we organized a searching party to look for her. Fred went up-stairs, and I took the lower floor.
It was I who found her, after all, lying full length on the grass in the little square yard back of the house. She was in a dead faint, and she was a much more difficult patient than Margery.
We could get no story from either of them that night. The two rooms had been ransacked, but apparently nothing had been stolen. Fred vowed he had locked and bolted the kitchen door, and that it had been opened from within.
It was a strange experience, that night intrusion into the house, without robbery as a motive. If Margery knew or suspected the reason for the outrage, she refused to say. As for Mrs. Butler, to mention the occurrence put her into hysteria. It was Fred who put forth the most startling theory of the lot.
"By George," he said the next morning when we had failed to find tracks in the yard, and Edith had reported every silver spoon in its place, "by George, it wouldn't surprise me if the lady in the grave clothes did it herself. There isn't anything a hysterical woman won't do to rouse your interest in her, if it begins to flag. How did any one get in through that kitchen door, when it was locked inside and bolted? I tell you, she opened it herself."
I did not like to force Margery's confidence, but I believed that the outrage was directly for the purpose of searching her room, perhaps for papers that had been her father's. Mrs. Butler came around enough by morning, to tell a semi-connected story in which she claimed that two men had come in from a veranda roof, and tried to chloroform her. That she had pretended to be asleep and had taken the first opportunity, while they were in the other room, to run down-stairs and into the yard. Edith thought it likely enough, being a credulous person.
As it turned out, Edith's intuition was more reliable than my skepticism,—or Fred's.