"Certainly!" I responded. "Those men I saw last night the missing watchman—it's all too suspicious to be allowed to wait another moment."
"I'll say it is!" replied Peaches vigorously. "You wait here while I run up and pound on the door!"
"Oh, Peaches! Send a servant!" I implored. "The burglars might be out there in the hall!"
But before the words were fairly out of my mouth she was gone, lighting the house as she went, and in an incredibly short time I could hear her pounding and shouting in the upper hall with a noise that was fit to wake the dead. Shivering with fatigue, but enlivened by the amazing turn which events had taken I occupied myself with switching on all the lights and making sure that the picture had not simply been lifted down for some reason and left in the room. But this was not the case—indeed I acted merely automatically and not because I really expected to find it. In a very few moments Peaches was back, a trifle flushed and breathless.
"They will be right down!" she announced. "I stirred up pa as well. Now, Free, old thing, what's our story when they do appear? We've got to stick to the same lie, you know, and we've got to say something plausible, because here it is two-thirty in the morning and it's quite obvious that we haven't been to bed, though we went up long before they did."
"Well," I responded hurriedly, for already the two men could be heard on the stairway, "though I deplore the use of untruth I fear we shall have to resort to it in this case. We will say—what on earth shall we say?"
"I had a headache and couldn't sleep," suggested Peaches. "So we came down!"
"Rotten!" I whispered fiercely. "In these clothes? Bah! We sat up late talking and came down intending to get something to eat, and you remembered a book you wanted. Here it is! Sh! They are here!"
Hastily I seized at random a volume from one of the shelves and laid it beside her on the sofa, and an instant later Markheim came bouncing into the room, a purple satin dressing gown flapping about his heels, his scant hair disordered. Closely following was Mr. Pegg, a lean but majestic figure with nightshirt tucked into his dress trousers and a raincoat thrown jauntily over one shoulder—presumably the first garments at hand—his magnificent shock of gray curls giving him somewhat the appearance of a lion roused from slumber.
"What's all this, what's all this?" cried Sebastian, running up to the mantelpiece. Then he clasped his hands over his bald spot in a gesture of despair. "Oh!" he moaned. "How perfectly terrible! How perfectly terrible!"