Doctor Alwyn left, and Blaine spent a busy half-hour making his arrangements for the night’s raid. Scarcely had he completed them when the telephone shrilled. The detective did not at first recognize the voice which came to him over the wire, so changed was it, so fraught with horror and a menace of tragedy.
“It is you, Miss Lawton?” he asked, half unbelievingly. “What is the matter? What has happened?”
“I must see you at once, at once, Mr. Blaine! I have made a discovery so unexpected, so terrible, that I am afraid to be alone; I am afraid of my own thoughts. Please, please come immediately!”
“I will be with you as soon as my car can reach your door,” he replied.
What could the young girl have discovered, shut up there in that great lonely house? What new developments could have arisen, in the case which until this moment had seemed plain to him to the end?
He found her awaiting him in the hall, with ashen face and trembling limbs. She clutched his hand with her small icy one, and whispered:
“Come into the library, Mr. Blaine. I have something to tell you––to show you!”
He followed her into the huge, somber, silent room where only a few short weeks ago her father had met with his death. Coming from the brilliant sunshine without, it was a moment or two before his eyes could penetrate the gloom. When they did so, he saw the great leather chair by the hearth, which had played so important a part in the tragedy, had been overturned.
“Mr. Blaine,”––the girl faced him, her voice steadied and deepened portentously,––“my father died of heart-disease, did he not?”