HAT a blessing trousers must be!” murmured Miss Gosling, surmounting the sill with anything but agility. Safe once more on the floor of her room, she heaved a sigh of relief. Then hurriedly but quietly she lifted in the slim chair which had served as a precarious step between the sill and the ground, closed the window and drew down the Venetian blind. She switched on a light, rubbed her eyes and picked from the carpet the letter which she had thrown in before making her entrance. Blinkingly she read the superscription.
“How very extraordinary!” she said under her breath. “Dear me, I shall have more than ever to think about now! What a life it is, to be sure!”
It seemed to her that much time must have elapsed since that violent ringing had roused her from her communion with the darkness and caused her to make for the door. As a matter of fact, the whole adventure had occupied barely four minutes. On hearing the scared housemaid's summons to Joan, she had felt that her presence might be acceptable to the girl. But as she was about to pass the library door, a sound from within—a slight jingle—brought her to a standstill, all on the alert. Soon a second sound came to her pricked-up ears. She recognized it, faint though it was. Since her arrival at Elm House she had heard it on quite a number of occasions. There is no other sound just the same as that produced by the opening of a safe drawer.
Her hand, which had gone forth involuntarily, came back without having touched the door. Softly she returned to her room, noiselessly locked herself in and almost silently proceeded to get herself out of the window. Then with her outstretched hand touching the wall she moved along the strip of grass bordering the bed, cautiously and hopefully.
UT on reaching the corner of the house, she came face to face with disappointment. The blaze—it seemed a blaze to her—from the library window informed her that the blind was up. What madness, then, for her to attempt to play the spy in that direction! “H'm!” she muttered, recoiling, “what's to be done now?”
Indecision was not a failing of Griselda Gosling's, but for once she felt at a loss, standing there in the dark, peering furtively round the angle at that so-distant yet so-near glow of electric light.
Then a startling thing happened. Into the glow came a slender hand and wrist. The hand held a letter; the wrist bore a watch-bracelet which the spinster had admired earlier in the evening. The hand fluttered the letter, let it go and disappeared. Almost immediately thereafter the light went out. And as swiftly the spinster's indecision gave place to determination. “I must have that letter!”
And now it was in her hand!
She had seen the late Mr. Cran's big, clumsy writing often enough lately to know it on this envelope. The green-penciled date also had a familiar look: it was March 3, and the unusual formation of the “3” suggested Joan at once. Moreover, there was at the present moment a green pencil in the pen-tray on the library writing-table. Therefore it was not to be doubted that Miss Lottie Lismore had abstracted the letter from her friend's safe. But why?
Questions began to pour into the lively mind of Miss Griselda Gosling as she stood in her room staring at that envelope. Minutes flew past. What was her immediate duty? Take the letter straightway to Joan and confound the girl's false friend? Yes; but would that be the best way of getting at the meaning of the theft? Quite the reverse, she decided at once.
ISS GOSLING'S sense of expediency began an argument with her sense of duty. It was fated to be brief, however. A slight jarring sound intruded on the silence. Wheeling about, she perceived that behind the blind the window was being raised from the outside. Swiftly she stepped backward to the door, but not before two of the laths were turned flat and between them protruded a shining object—unmistakably, even to a spinster's eyes, a revolver.
“Kindly throw me that letter,” said a smooth voice.
Miss Gosling may have been afraid of the weapon, but the cool command had the odd effect of making her exceedingly angry. At the same time it flashed into her mind that of the thousand villains in her reading-experience, not one had actually fired at a woman.
“Certainly not!” she snapped.
“I will count three,” said the voice, “and then I will shoot. Stop! Don't you try to open that door!”
“I wasn't,” she retorted, letting fall the key. “The door's locked,” she added as with an awkward movement of her foot she pushed the key under it.
“The letter, quick!”
The letter, too, fell from Miss Gosling's fingers. Another awkward movement, and it had followed the key.