“My mother and I live here,” Danby said. “I should prefer greater simplicity, but a beautiful old lady you call ‘mother’ must always be humored.” Florence could have loved him for that speech.
She understood more clearly what he meant when, once inside the wide reception room, they were met by a butler and a white-capped maid whisked her away to a spacious bedroom all fitted up with massive furniture.
Sleep came at once. Before she realized it a rosy dawn ushered in another day. “What shall this day bring forth?” she murmured as, with a chill and a thrill, she leaped from her bed to do a dozen setting-up exercises, and at last to dress herself in her most business-like costume.
“Mademoiselle the detective,” she laughed as she looked in the mirror. “I surely don’t look the part.”
CHAPTER XIII
SUSPECTS
The small city—scarcely more than a large village—that Florence found herself entering that morning was, at this season of the year, a place of enchanting beauty. Half hidden by the New England hills, its white homes surrounded by trees and shrubs turned by the hand of a master artist, Nature, into things of flaming red and gold, it seemed the setting for some marvelous production in drama or opera.
“It—it seems so unreal,” she whispered to herself. “The hillside all red, orange and gold, the houses so clean and white. Even the women and children in their bright dresses seem automatic things run by springs and strings.”
Finding herself half-way up a hill, on one side of which a whole procession of very small houses, all just alike, appeared to be struggling, she paused to stare at a sign which read: “Room for rent.”
“How could they rent a room?” she asked herself. “The house is little more than a bird’s nest.”
Consumed by curiosity, she climbed the narrow steps and knocked at the door.