"I guess I will," he said, looking apologetically at his muddy clothes. "This thing is only a matter of form, anyhow."
But he didn't lie down on the couch. He took a chair in the hall near the foot of the stairs, and we left him there, with the evening paper and a lamp. It was a queer situation, to say the least.
CHAPTER X
BREAKING THE NEWS
Wardrop looked so wretched that I asked him into my room, and mixed him some whisky and water. When I had given him a cigar he began to look a little less hopeless.
"You've been a darned sight better to me than I would have been to you, under the circumstances," he said gratefully.
"I thought we would better arrange about Miss Margery before we try to settle down," I replied. "What she has gone through in the last twenty-four hours is nothing to what is coming to-morrow. Will you tell her about her father?"
He took a turn about the room.
"I believe it would come better from you," he said finally. "I am in the peculiar position of having been suspected by her father of robbing him, by you of carrying away her aunt, and now by the police and everybody else of murdering her father."