“No,” glumly. “I recollect twirling it about my fingers just before Mrs. Ward fell unconscious to the floor. After we carried her to her room I searched for the string but could not find it,” finished Penfield.
The parting of the portières disturbed Mrs. Burnham and looking up she beheld Jones, his eyes twice their usual size, regarding her from the doorway.
“Dinner is served, madam,” he announced.
CHAPTER VI
DEVELOPMENTS
SCURRYING footsteps caused Peter Burnham to stop unwrapping the bundle in his hand and dart to the door of his bedroom. From that vantage point he saw Evelyn cross the hall and disappear down the staircase. He took quick note of her well cut sport suit and the lovely bouquet of orchids pinned thereon. Evelyn, busily engaged in adjusting a stray curl under her smart tri-cornered hat, failed to observe her step-father standing well back in the shadow of his doorway. Burnham waited in indecision until the slam of the front door reached him, then going back to his bureau he closed its drawers and went swiftly to his wife’s boudoir.
Mrs. Burnham looked up at his approach and dropped her knitting in her lap.
“Don’t close the door, Peter,” she remonstrated. “It is very warm in here and the room is stuffy.”
“Then why not open this second window?” asked Burnham. Not waiting for an answer to his question, he threw up the sash and in the sudden current of air admitted by the opening of the window, the papers on his wife’s desk blew about the room.
“There, Peter, see what you have done.” Mrs. Burnham’s vexation was betrayed by her heightened color. “And I have just tidied my desk. Be sure and put every letter back exactly where it was.”
It took Burnham some minutes to comply with her request, and she observed with silent, but growing irritation, that her correspondence was not being piled in neat little packages such as she had arranged with minute attention to detail earlier that morning.