“Please, please keep up your search,” a woman’s voice pleaded. “Please, Oscar. I’ll give you more than I promised—a hundred dollars more.”
Kitty straightened up and stared about her. The voices sounded clearly in her ears, but surely she was alone in the library? Running over to the tea table, she felt about and snatched up the much-sought matches. The next instant she was back at the lamp and a second later the room was illuminated. She was its only occupant.
Where had the voices come from? As her eyes roved about the library she spied the “Dutch” door near where she was standing. The little panel in the upper half of the door had been left open and through it came faintly the sound of receding footsteps.
Throwing wide the door, Kitty stepped outside. In the gathering darkness no one was visible. She paused in thought, her troubled eyes trying to pierce the gloom of the desolate garden and the empty pathway circling the mansion. The woman’s voice still echoed in her ears—where, where had she heard its haunting quality before?
CHAPTER XIV
AND CORRUPTION
Kitty paused before her bureau and inspected herself in the mirror. It had been a relief to change from her street clothes to a dressing gown. She had spent nearly an hour lying on the couch in her bedroom trying to piece together the puzzling events of the afternoon. On reëntering the house she had gone at once to the servants’ quarters; from there she had searched every room, even to the attic. To all appearances Oscar was not in the house. She had then waited in the library, hoping to catch him on his entrance, but evidently he had accompanied the unknown woman away from the house.
Kitty struck her hands together in impotent wrath at the thought. Why had she not realized immediately that the speakers were outside the house, and not wasted precious minutes trying to light the lamp in the library and thus given them time to slip away unseen!