Burnham shifted his weight first on one foot and then on the other, his hands clenched inside his coat pockets.
“My dear Lillian, you cannot establish a motive for the crime—if crime it was,” he interpolated, “until you establish the man’s identity. See you later,” and smiling affectionately at her he turned and left the room.
Mrs. Burnham knitted on and the khaki sweater gained in size as her industrious fingers plied the needles. Finally she laid the half completed garment in her lap and looked about the boudoir. It was a pleasant room, light and airy, and its home-like atmosphere was borne out in its furniture still covered with summer chintz. The oddly shaped octagon wing added to its size and general appearance.
Mrs. Burnham stared thoughtfully down into the garden which the octagon windows overlooked, then turned her head and glanced through the side window diagonally across into Evelyn’s bedroom. From where she sat she viewed with displeasure the clothes thrown in a disorderly heap on Evelyn’s bed and started to call through the opened windows to the chambermaid whom she glimpsed in another part of the room, not to put away the clothes but to leave that task to Evelyn. Even as she made up her mind, the maid whisked out of the bedroom and Mrs. Burnham turned her attention to the room in which she was sitting.
Laying her knitting on the table she listened a moment. Only the twitter of birds and the distant hum of a motor disturbed the peaceful autumn stillness. Releasing her hold on the sweater, Mrs. Burnham picked up her large knitting bag and when she removed her hand from its capacious interior her fingers grasped a pair of shell spectacles and a book. Laying the latter in her lap she adjusted the spectacles on her nose, then she raised the book and scanned its title: “Taylor’s Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology.” She turned the leaves rapidly until she came to the heading “Detection of Poisons” and her eyes ran down the pages picking out the paragraphs opposite which she discerned faint pencil marks. When she again returned the book to its place in her knitting bag an hour had passed.
Blissfully unconscious that she had formed the chief topic of conversation between her step-father and mother, Evelyn Preston, on leaving the house, hurried to Dupont Circle and seeing a disengaged taxi waiting at the cab-stand she entered the machine and directed the chauffeur to take her to Potomac Park.
As the taxi-cab threaded its way among the vehicles filling Seventeenth Street below Pennsylvania Avenue, Evelyn gazed in wonder at the congested sidewalks. It was the noon hour and clerks from the immense Government buildings in the vicinity were hurrying to lunch rooms and cafeterias which had sprung up like mushrooms to meet the demands of hungry humanity. Evelyn mentally contrasted the scene with that in the same locality six months before and shook her head in bewilderment; the once peaceful old-time residence district had been electrified into life by the iron hand of war.
The taxi-cab, narrowly missing an on-coming touring car which zig-zagged unpleasantly in its effort to make the turn into Seventeenth Street, swung into Potomac Drive and, following Evelyn’s directions, the chauffeur drove his car to the Aviation Field which had been formerly the polo grounds of the National Capital. The taxi-cab’s approach had been observed from the hangar, and one of the officers standing near the building crossed the turf and was at the roadside when the car drew up.
As Evelyn looked down into La Montagne’s happy upturned face all the doubts which had been tormenting her vanished. Without speaking he jerked open the cab door and seated himself by her side.
“My heart’s dearest,” he murmured in rapid French. “At last!” and his hands clasped hers and stooping he kissed her in the shelter of the closed cab. “Mrs. Van Ness explained——” he began a moment later.