He had been paying
you unwelcome attentions."
And I had never seen the man!
When she nodded a "yes" I saw the tremendous possibilities
involved. If this detective could prove that Gertrude feared and
disliked the murdered man, and that Mr. Armstrong had been
annoying and possibly pursuing her with hateful attentions, all
that, added to Gertrude's confession of her presence in the
billiard-room at the time of the crime, looked strange, to say
the least. The prominence of the family assured a strenuous
effort to find the murderer, and if we had nothing worse to look
forward to, we were sure of a distasteful publicity.
Mr. Jamieson shut his note-book with a snap, and thanked us.
"I have an idea," he said, apropos of nothing at all, "that at
any rate the ghost is laid here. Whatever the rappings have
been--and the colored man says they began when the family went
west three months ago--they are likely to stop now."
Which shows how much he knew about it. The ghost was not laid:
with the murder of Arnold Armstrong he, or it, only seemed to
take on fresh vigor.
Mr. Jamieson left then, and when Gertrude had gone up-stairs, as
she did at once, I sat and thought over what I had just heard.
Her engagement, once so engrossing a matter, paled now beside the
significance of her story. If Halsey and Jack Bailey had left
before the crime, how came Halsey's revolver in the tulip bed?
What was the mysterious cause of their sudden flight? What had
Gertrude left in the billiard-room? What was the significance of
the cuff-link, and where was it?
CHAPTER VI
IN THE EAST CORRIDOR
When the detective left he enjoined absolute secrecy on everybody
in the household.
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