I did not like to force Margery's confidence, but I believed that the outrage was directly for the purpose of searching her room, perhaps for papers that had been her father's. Mrs. Butler came around enough by morning, to tell a semi-connected story in which she claimed that two men had come in from a veranda roof, and tried to chloroform her. That she had pretended to be asleep and had taken the first opportunity, while they were in the other room, to run down-stairs and into the yard. Edith thought it likely enough, being a credulous person.
As it turned out, Edith's intuition was more reliable than my skepticism,--or Fred's.
The inability of Margery Fleming to tell who had chloroformed her, and Mrs. Butler's white face and brooding eyes made a very respectable mystery out of the affair. Only Fred, Edith and I came down to breakfast that morning. Fred's expression was half amused, half puzzled. Edith fluttered uneasily over the coffee machine, her cheeks as red as the bow of ribbon at her throat. I was preoccupied, and, like Fred, I propped the morning paper in front of me and proceeded to think in its shelter.
"Did you find anything, Fred?" Edith asked. Fred did not reply, so she repeated the question with some emphasis.
"Eh--what?" Fred inquired, peering around the corner of the paper.
"Yes, dear--that is, no. Nothing to amount to anything. Upon my soul, Jack, if I wrote the editorials of this paper, I'd _say_ something." He subsided into inarticulate growls behind the paper, and everything was quiet. Then I heard a sniffle, distinctly. I looked up. Edith was crying--pouring cream into a coffee cup, and feeling blindly for the sugar, with her pretty face twisted and her pretty eyes obscured. In a second I was up, had crumpled the newspapers, including Fred's, into a ball, and had lifted him bodily out of his chair.
"When I am married," I said fiercely, jerking him around to Edith and pushing him into a chair beside her, "if I ever read the paper at breakfast when my wife is bursting for conversation, may I have some good and faithful friend who will bring me back to a sense of my duty." I drew a chair to Edith's other side. "Now, let's talk," I said.
She wiped her eyes shamelessly with her table napkin. "There isn't a soul in this house I can talk to," she wailed. "All kinds of awful things happening--and we had to send for coffee this morning, Jack. You must have used four pounds last night--and nobody will tell me a thing. There's no use asking Margery--she's sick at her stomach from the chloroform--and Ellen never talks except about herself, and she's horribly--uninteresting. And Fred and you make a ba--barricade out of newspapers, and fire 'yes' at me when you mean 'no.'"