Then of a sudden her eyes fell upon the little horsehair trunk. “I forgot to open it! And uncle said I should have it only for a day. Just for a day!” She was filled with consternation.
“He will have to give me one more day,” she decided at last. “He just must! I can’t turn it over to—to vandals.”
For one full moment after that she stood in sober thought. Nida McFay. So that was the girl’s name. She was to win her confidence. Get her story. Would she do it? Something told her that she would. But why? Because the whisper requested. Who was the whisperer? At that she shook herself free from these thoughts and went off to breakfast.
CHAPTER XV
A LIVING PICTURE
Johnny Thompson had always supposed he loved mysteries. But in the “House of Magic,” the old professor’s house, they came so thick and fast, and apparently without reason, that at times he felt dizzy in his head and ready enough to run away from it all.
On the day following the visit to Madame LeClare’s house, he was given a strange commission. It was Felix who said to him, “You will do us a great favor if you will sit and watch a certain picture on the wall.”
“Watch a picture?” Johnny exclaimed. “Is it worth a million dollars? And do you expect it to be stolen?”
“It is worth,” Felix said without breaking into a smile, “very little. I even doubt if you could sell it at all.
“And yet,” he added, “if you watch it long enough, something may come of it after all!”
Something did come of it, you may be sure. But to Johnny, ever keen for action, this at first seemed a dull occupation.