“I’ll be up in half an hour at the latest.”
“Do come quickly. I’m—I’m a little frightened.”
“Then you must have something to do,” said Average Jones decisively. “Have you been keeping an eye on the garden?”
“Yes.”
“Go through it again, looking carefully for signs of disarranged earth. I don’t think you’ll find it, but it’s well to be sure. Let me in at the basement door at half-past one. Judge Ackroyd mustn’t see me.”
It was a strangely misshapen presentation of the normally spick-and-span Average Jones that gently rang the basement bell of the old house at the specified hour. All his pockets bulged with lumpy angles. Immediately, upon being admitted by Miss Graham herself, he proceeded to disenburden himself of box after box, such as elastic bands come in, all exhibiting a homogeneous peculiarity, a hole at one end thinly covered with a gelatinous substance.
“Be very careful not to let that get broken,” he instructed the mystified girl. “In the course of an hour or so it will melt away itself. Did you see anything suspicious in the garden?”
“No!” replied the girl. She picked up one of the boxes. “How odd!” she cried. “Why, there’s something in it that’s alive!”
“Very much so. Your friends, the beetles, in fact.”
“What! Again? Aren’t you carrying the joke rather far?”