"You're leaving out altogether too much. How about my door being locked? How about the dago sailor at the inn? How about Miss Tabor's warning me off for all time, and then meeting me here as if she hadn't seen me since Christmas?"
Bob smoked and frowned a moment, then brushed the difficulty aside.
"Accidents, old fellow, accidents. The locked door was a mistake, unless somebody thought you were too dangerous a reprobate to leave at large. The guinea was drunk, on your own showing. As for Lady, she has a better head than the average, but you can't get me to waste any time figuring out how any woman's mind works. I've been married three years."
"Well, I'm going to find out what it all means."
"It doesn't all mean anything. That's where your kaleidoscopic imagination gets to work. There isn't any conceivable connection between these details! and you talk as if they were veiled and awful hints all pointing one way. Your dragons are windmills, I tell you, and your helmet's a copper kettle."
"You'd think differently if you had been there. Besides, I know—" I stopped short. Bob was my friend, and whatever I chose to tell him was my own business; but even to him I was not betraying confidences.
"Bob," I said, "I can't prove it, even to you, but I know that there is something wrong; and I firmly believe that somehow or other all these things work into it. Now, if you can throw any light at all, help me out."
"I've told you all I know. I'm not exactly an intimate of these people, but I've known them off and on for three or four years, and there simply isn't anything unusual about them. They're just like every one else, only a little nicer—the last people on earth to act queerly or have a closet skeleton."
"At any rate, they seem to want to get rid of me," I said. "Well, they can't do it. If they've got some scandalous idea of me, they're going to apologize; and if they're in trouble, I'm going to make myself useful. I've fallen into an adventure, and I'm going through with it."
"I'll tell you one thing," said Bob, very solemnly for him, "if there is any family secret, it's nothing against Lady. She's about as good and white and honest—but you don't need to be told that."