can't understand it," Miss Abby was saying. "Peters, at what time did you go to Mr. Arnold's room this morning?"
"Shortly after nine o'clock, ma'am."
"Why did you go?"
"Well, ma'am, you see, Mr. Arnold always rings for me promptly at eight-thirty. And this morning he didn't ring, and I waited and waited until after nine, and then I made bold to go and tap at his door. I knocked three times, and he didn't answer, so I ventured to try the door. It wasn't locked, and I went in. Mr. Arnold wasn't there, and his bed hadn't been slept in. The covers were folded just as I always turn them down for him every night. His clothes were not about, and there was no sign of anybody."
"But this is very strange," pursued Miss Abby, quite as if it were Peter's fault. "Why should Mr. Arnold sit up all night?"
"I don't know, ma'am. But if he did do that same, where is he now?"
"He must be somewhere about the place," said Miss Abby decidedly. "Of course there is an explanation. He may have gone for a walk late last night, and have fallen or met with some accident."
"Excuse me, ma'am," said Driggs, "but he couldn't get out of the house."
"Why couldn't he?" inquired Mrs. Duncan.
"Because," explained Driggs, "Mr. Arnold always turns on the burglar-alarm himself every night; and I turn it off every morning. When I look at it in the morning, ma'am, the indicator would show if it had been tampered with during the night."
"Are you sure?" asked Mr. Crane, with interest.
"Yes, sir; and if a window or door had been opened during the night while that there alarm was set, there'd have been a ringin' of electric bells all over this house, a-makin' such a din as nobody could have slept through. No, sir, that alarm wasn't touched from the time Mr. Arnold put it on last night, till I put it off this morning. And between them times, they wasn't no door nor window opened or shut in this whole house. Therefore, I says Mr. Arnold must be in the house, because he couldn't get out."
In his intense earnestness, Driggs had almost forgotten his servility of manner, and, looking straight at Mr. Crane, spoke as man to man, in the face of a great mystery. Then he turned his gaze to Miss Wadsworth, and, though she also was mystified, she nodded her head in corroboration of Drigg's statements and his conclusion therefrom.
"It is so," she said. "Justin has often explained to me how perfectly the alarm works, and how impossible it is to open an outside door or a window without starting the bells to ringing."
"Might it not be temporarily out of order?" suggested Mr. Crane, who had constituted himself Miss Abby's right-hand man and chief adviser.
"It never has been, sir," volunteered Driggs, "since I've been here, and that's nigh on to forty years. I come here a young man, when Mr. Justin was a baby; and his father was a crank, if I may say it, about burglars. He had all the wiring done and the alarm put in in his day; and, following his orders, Mr. Justin has kept the thing up, and has added a good many new contraptions as fast as they were invented. No, sir, wherever my master may be, and whatever his reason for hiding, he's in this house! 'Cause why? 'Cause he couldn't get out, without either turning off that alarm or raising a clatter; and neither of those things was done."
"Then he must be in the house," said Mr. Crane. "This is a large and rambling structure. May he not have gone into some one of the smaller rooms, and perhaps suffered from some kind of a seizure or stroke?"
"Good gracious!" exclaimed Miss Abby. "Do you mean that Justin may be alone and unconscious, perhaps suffering, under this very roof?"
"I only mean that it might be so."
"Then let us have a thorough search made," said Miss Abby excitedly. "Peters, you know which rooms Mr. Arnold would be likely to go into—go and search them all, at once. Take some of the other servants to help you. Go all over the house, into every nook and cranny."
Peters departed, though the expression on his face showed that he hardly thought this solution of the mystery probable.
"It isn't like Mr. Arnold," began Ernest Chapin, speaking slowly, "to go into any unused room so late at night. As you know, Miss Wadsworth, Mr. Arnold is most systematic in his habits. After turning on the alarm, he invariably goes directly to his room and to bed."
"That is so," agreed Miss Abby; "but as we have to face an unusual state of things, we must admit that Justin departed from his regular systematic procedure, and we must assume an unusual occurrence of some sort."
"But it all seems so ridiculous," spoke up Dorothy; "I'm sure Justin has only gone out for a walk or a ride, and will bob in at any minute. He might have started out after Driggs took off the alarm."
"But his bed has not been slept in," Miss Abby reminded her. "Peters says he thinks Justin did not go to his room at all, as his brushes and things have not been touched since Peters arranged them for the night."
"There seems to be nothing the matter except that Justin didn't sleep in his own room," said Dorothy. "I don't think that's anything to make such a fuss about. He must have gone to New York, or somewhere, late last night, after the rest of us had all gone upstairs. Then, as he knew he couldn't get in this house during the night, he stayed in New York and he will come home on an early train."
Mabel Crane looked at Dorothy steadily. At first the girl did not see her, then when she became aware of the close observation, she flushed crimson and buried her face in her mother's shoulder.
"Who saw him last?" inquired Fred Crane, suddenly.
Dorothy lifted her head and stared at the speaker. Then she glanced round the room. Everybody was looking at Crane as if waiting for him to answer his own question.
Chapter VIII.
The Search
"Why, I don't know," said Miss Wadsworth at last; "it must have been some of the servants, I suppose. Let me see, we ladies all went upstairs about midnight, and I suppose you men went to the smoking-room—didn't you, Mr. Crane?"
"Yes; and we stayed there, I should think, some fifteen or twenty minutes. There were only Arnold, Mr. Chapin, and myself. The night before, Gale and Crosby were here, and we had a merrier time. But last night we weren't very gay, and I went upstairs, I should say, about twelve-thirty."
"That's right," said Mr. Chapin; "we went upstairs at half-past twelve. When I left Mr. Arnold, he said he would make his tour of inspection of the house, as he always did, set the alarm, and then turn in. He must have done this, for he came upstairs not more than ten minutes after I did."
As Ernest Chapin said all this, in a slow, clear, and careful voice, he looked straight at Dorothy. The girl understood perfectly that he intended to say nothing of the scene on the little balcony, or of Mr. Arnold's appearance. She realized that he was doing this to screen her from possible unkind criticisms, for while Justin Arnold's whereabouts remained a mystery, it would be unpleasant to have a lovers' quarrel affect the question.
Dorothy was grateful to Mr. Chapin for this consideration, and as of course it was assumed that all the ladies had gone straight to their rooms and stayed there, no further questions were asked about it.
But now that it was acknowledged that the disappearance was a mystery, every one began to feel a vague uneasiness that was appalling because of its very vagueness. The facts were so few and so contradictory: Justin Arnold was missing; he could not get out of the house, and yet he was not in the house. That was the case in a nutshell.
Peters returned from his search of the rooms, and announced that there was no sign of the missing man, and no sign of anything unusual or strange in any room.
"When did you see Mr. Arnold last, Peters?" inquired Mr. Crane of the valet.
"When I laid out his dinner clothes, sir; or, rather, when I attended him as