“Mrs. Simpson in?” Cray inquired.
“Yes, sir,” the girl answered, looking doubtfully at him, “but I don’t believe she will feel like seeing any one. She hasn’t been very well.”
“I hope she will see me,” Cray declared. “Please say that I’m Mr. Jones, from the Chronicle and Observer office, and would like very much to see her for a few minutes.”
The girl was obviously impressed by this information, and, without further argument, conducted him into one of the rooms off the reception hall, and then hurried away to communicate with her mistress.
With the natural instinct of the detective, Cray looked keenly about him, and there was something that impressed him at once.
The house he was in was by no means a large one, but the furniture seemed to have come from a much smaller house. The diminutive hatrack was positively lost in the square hall, the rugs were little more than patches on the inlaid floor, and the stair carpet—which he could see through the door—was shabby, and too narrow for the stairs.
In short, though John Simpson had recently taken a larger house, he had either been unable to furnish it adequately, or else had been too hurried or careless to do so.
“Mrs. Simpson will see you, sir,” the maid announced, when she returned. “She will be down in a few minutes.”
Presently, the fugitive’s wife descended the stairs. She was a small, slight woman, plainly dressed, and apparently about forty years of age, though her lined face and gray hair caused her to look much older than many women do nowadays at that age.
“You have news of my husband, Mr. Jones?” she asked eagerly, holding her hands out in unconscious pleading, so that Cray could see that they had been roughened by hard work.