When a Man Marries

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

Max was in a very bad temper; I suppose he had not had enough sleep—no one had. But he came over while the lottery was going on and stood over me and demanded unpleasantly, in a whisper, that I stop masquerading as another man’s wife and generally making a fool of myself—which is the way he put it. And I knew in my heart that he was right, and I hated him for it.

“Why don’t you go and tell him—them?” I asked nastily. No one was paying any attention to us. “Tell them that, to be obliging, I have nearly drowned in a sea of lies; tell them that I am not only not married, but that I never intend to marry; tell them that we are a lot of idiots with nothing better to do than to trifle with strangers within our gates, people who build—I mean, people that are worth two to our one! Run and tell them.”

He looked at me for a minute, then he turned on his heel and left me. It looked as though Max might be going to be difficult.

While I was improvising an apron out of a towel, and Anne was pinning a sheet into a kimono, so she could take off her dinner gown and still be proper, Dallas harked back to the robbery.

“Ann put the collar on the table there,” he said. “There’s no mistake about that. I watched her do it, for I remember thinking it was the sole reminder I had that Consolidated Traction ever went above thirty-nine.”

Max was looking around the room, examining the window locks and whistling between his teeth. He was in disgrace with every one, for by that time it was light enough to see three reporters with cameras across the street waiting for enough sun to snap the house, and everybody knew that it was Max and his idiotic wager that had done it. He had made two or three conciliatory remarks, but no one would speak to him. His antics were so queer, however, that we were all watching him, and when he had felt over the rug with his hands, and raised the edges, and tried to lift out the chair seats, and had shaken out Dal’s shoes (he said people often hid things and then forgot about it), he made a proposition.

“If you will take that infernal furnace from around my neck, I’ll undertake either to find the jewels or to show up the thief,” he said quietly. And of course, with all the people in the house under suspicion, every one had to hail the suggestion with joy, and to offer his assistance, and Jimmy had to take Max’s share of the furnace. So they took the scullery slip downstairs to the policeman, and gave Jim Max’s share of the furnace. (Yes, I had broken the policeman to them gently. Of course, Anne said at once that he was the thief, but they found him tucked in and sound asleep with his back against the furnace.)

“In the first place,” Max said, standing importantly in the middle of the room, “we retired between two and three—nearer three. So the theft occurred between three and five, when Anne woke up. Was your door locked, Dal?”

“No. The door into the hall was, but the door into the dressing room was open, and we found the door from there into the hall open this morning.”

“From three until five,” Max repeated. “Was any one out of his room during that time?”