“Your head’s all right, old man. I told you that when you were my patient at Walter Reed,” responded McLean cheerily. “A few weeks more and—” He stopped speaking as they crossed the Q Street bridge into Georgetown, then, stepping on the accelerator, he raced the car up the steeply graded street and drew up in front of a high terrace.
“Hello, are you going to ‘Rose Hill’?” demanded Wallace, wakened from his lethargy by the stopping of the car. He had apparently been unaware that McLean had left his last sentence unfinished. “Who is ill?”
“I don’t know.” McLean leaned back to pick up his instrument bag which he carried in the compartment behind his seat. “My servant called to me just as I was leaving home that I had been telephoned to come over here at once. I didn’t catch all she said. I suppose Kitty Baird is ill. That girl is a bundle of nerves.”
Wallace clambered out of the car so that his more nimble companion would not have to climb over his long legs in getting out. As McLean turned to close the door of his car, Wallace’s hand descended heavily upon his shoulder.
“What—who—who’s that standing in the Baird’s doorway?” he gasped. “A policeman?”
McLean swung around and glanced up at the house. A long flight of stone steps led up to the front door and a landing marked each break in the terrace whereon grew rosebushes. It was the picturesque garden which gave its name to the fine old mansion—Rose Hill. The mansion had been built in colonial times when the surrounding land, on which stood modern houses and the present-day streets, had been part of the “plantation” owned by General Josiah Baird of Revolutionary fame. The hand of progress had left the mansion perched high above the graded street, but it had not touched its fine air of repose, nor diminished the beauty of its classic Greek architecture.
Standing under the fanlight over the doorway was the burly form of a blue-coated policeman.
“Yes, that’s one of the ‘City’s finest,’” he laughed. “What of it?” he added, observing his companion’s agitation in astonishment. “The policeman is probably taking the census; one called on me last Saturday.”
Wallace swallowed hard. “That’s it,” he mumbled, rather than spoke. “You’ve hit it.”