I am not his aunt, as I have said.
"Won't you ask her in?" She had a low, sweet voice.
"Certainly, if you wish," he said, and made no move to do it. "You dismissed me to-day," he accused her.
"I didn't need a doctor."
"I need not have come professionally. I am here now only—well, because I couldn't stay away."
She said nothing to that, as far as I could hear.
"I came also," he said, "to ask you not to stay here alone to-night."
What do you mean?" she asked sharply.
"Only that you might do the same thing again to-night—walk in your sleep, you know."
I heard her chair move, as if she had turned abruptly and faced him.
"Why do you say that?" she demanded. "You know I was not asleep last night."
"I assure you—" he began, clearly startled. "I—really thought—"
"Please!" she said, and there was another silence. Then I realized she was crying softly.
"Don't do that!" pleaded Tommy. "Don't!"
"I thought you were killed!" she said, in a smothered tone. "All the rest of the night I sat and wanted to die. I thought I had killed you!"
"Where did you sit?" asked Tommy gently.
"It doesn't matter, does it?"
"Very much—to me."
"I was—here," she said, after a hesitation.
"You were not here," said Tommy. "Between that and morning, I was here four times. Where were you?"
"I was safe," she said. 'Why do you question me so?"
"Because," he said gently, "I was in the laboratory at two o'clock this morning. Jacobs helped me with a—wound on my shoulder. I had looked everywhere for you and failed to find you. I thought I heard somebody moving across the hall, and we made a casual search. We found nothing, nobody. But during the fifteen minutes that that door was unlocked, somebody entered the building, and cut the throats of eleven guinea-pigs, piling them in the center of the room. And—on the floor underneath them I picked up this afternoon a small pink rosette, apparently off the toe of a woman's bedroom slipper."
"Ah!" she said, as if she found it suddenly hard to breathe. And then she burst out unexpectedly. "After all, was it so terrible? They—they were only guinea-pigs!"
"Yes," said Tommy gravely, "they were only guinea-pigs."
He came out the next moment and went back along the hall into the hospital, having quite forgotten me. His chin was sunk on his breast, and he walked heavily. He was as bewildered as I had been. We saw him only once again that evening, and then only for a minute. He was preparing to station his guards through the house, much to Tish's disgust.
"It's idiotic," she confided to Aggie and me that night as Aggie was getting ready for bed. "Isn't the creature dead? Do they expect it to come back from the spirit world and do a materializing seance for them while they wait?"
"That's all very well, Tish," said Aggie, turning on all the lights and getting into bed, "but that hand was not hairy."
"Foot, you mean," said Tish. "If that is a footprint on the wall of that room up-stairs, it was a foot you touched last night."
At nine o'clock that night Tommy had a talk with Miss Durand, the night nurse of K ward. She denied being out of the ward between twelve-ten and one o'clock, and characterized Bates' whole story as a fabrication.
"He's always making trouble. Doctor," she told Tommy. "He brings in tobacco and morphine and sells it to the men, and you take his word against mine!"
And Tommy said that Bates, with Miss Durand's outraged eyes on him, reduced the time of her absence to ten minutes, and might have gone further if Tommy hadn't turned away in disgust.
Chapter XII.
The Carbolic Case and a Brown Coat
Tommy was very gloomy that night. He went about placing guards, with his mouth set in a grim line and his eyes hard. A few of the nurses knew what was going on, but with the exception of the three of us, none of the patients had been told.
To Tish's assurance that the trouble was over, that the death of Hero, the ape, meant the end of the disturbance, Tommy turned a tolerant smile and a deaf ear. I would have given a good bit to have had Tish's conviction, but no theory that was based on Hero at the Zoo could possibly involve Miss Blake. And Tommy and I knew that Miss Blake was involved.
I had not told Tish the particulars of Tommy's visit to the girl's room, or about the rosette he had confronted her with. To be candid, Tish was disagreeable about my having gone with Tommy, and only relaxed when, at supper time, a package came from Charlie Sands, and proved to contain the very towel with which the giant ape had been killed,
"Thought you might like it," Charlie wrote. "I snitched it while the keeper's back was turned. Gruesome, but interesting, isn't it? The beast was almost human, and as far as I know this may be the towel with which he performed his final ablutions—or do apes ablute?"
Tish laid it solemnly out on the bed and, going to the dresser drawer, brought out the one that had, as you may say, suspended Johnson. They were absolutely alike, even to the position of the S. P. T. which distinguished them both.
Tommy came into Aggie's room about eleven o'clock and sat, as usual, on the foot of the bed. He had lost his customary air of good-natured raillery, and looked tired.
"I've placed them all," he said. "Counting myself, there are fourteen of us, and I don't think a germ could escape from any of the wards without my knowing it."
"How about the private rooms?" I asked. "There's as apt to be mischief done by pay patients as by charities."
"You're right, there. Well, every corridor is under secret surveillance. The doors into the nurses' dormitory are being watched on every floor, and we have a man on the roof."
"Humph!" said Aggie, from the bed. "You'd do better to have a barrel of holy water. Things that dissolve under your fingers, just as the clock strikes midnight—it was midnight, Tish. The clock in the hall is five minutes fast by my watch."
"Fiddlesticks!" Tish said tartly. "Then the sun's too fast; you'd better have it regulated. No, Tommy, it would have been more to the point if you'd taken all these precautions last night. You are too late."
"I hope so," Tommy observed and got off the bed. "I'll come around now and then and keep you posted." He started toward the door and stopped, looking at me. "You haven't seen—Miss Blake? She has not come from the dormitory?"
"No."
He looked relieved at that and went out, and for an hour we saw nothing of him.
A little before midnight Miss Lewis brought in on a tray three glasses of buttermilk and some crackers.
"I knew none of you were sleeping," she said. "This will do you good. I don't mind saying my nerves are all twittering. This house is enough to set you crazy. If you go around a comer unexpectedly, you come across a figure ducking into a doorway. A nurse from L ward just fell across one of the moppers squatting in a corner by the pantry and threw a bowl of chicken broth at him, thinking it was Johnson himself."
"They might as well calm themselves," Tish observed, sipping her buttermilk. "Nothing will happen."
"Then why don't you take off your clothes and go to bed?" Aggie asked, but Tish scornfully refused to answer.
"I'm not expecting anything myself," observed Miss Lewis, straightening her cap at the mirror. "These things have a way of petering out—and yet, on the other hand, things in