“It was my fault,” she said wretchedly,
“my fault, I should not have sent them the word.”
After a few minutes she grew quiet. She seemed
to hesitate over something, and finally determined
to say it.
“You will understand better, sir, when I say
that I was raised in the Harrington family.
Mr. Harrington was Mr. Sullivan’s wife’s
father!”
AT THE STATION
So it had been the tiger, not the lady! Well,
I had held to that theory all through. Jennie
suddenly became a valuable person; if necessary she
could prove the connection between Sullivan and the
murdered man, and show a motive for the crime.
I was triumphant when Hotchkiss came in. When
the girl had produced a photograph of Mrs. Sullivan,
and I had recognized the bronze-haired girl of the
train, we were both well satisfied—which
goes to prove the ephemeral nature of most human contentments.
Jennie either had nothing more to say, or feared she
had said too much. She was evidently uneasy
before Hotchkiss. I told her that Mrs. Sullivan
was recovering in a Baltimore hospital, but she already
knew it, from some source, and merely nodded.
She made a few preparations for leaving, while Hotchkiss
and I compared notes, and then, with the cat in her
arms, she climbed into the trap from the town.
I sat with her, and on the way down she told me a
little, not much.
“If you see Mrs. Sullivan,” she advised,
“and she is conscious, she probably thinks that
both her husband and her father were killed in the
wreck. She will be in a bad way, sir.”
“You mean that she—still cares about
her husband?”
The cat crawled over on to my knee, and rubbed its
bead against my hand invitingly. Jennie stared
at the undulating line of the mountain crests, a colossal
sun against a blue ocean of sky. “Yes,
she cares,” she said softly. “Women
are made like that. They say they are cats,
but Peter there in your lap wouldn’t come back
and lick your hand if you kicked him. If—if
you have to tell her the truth, be as gentle as you
can, sir. She has been good to me—that’s
why I have played the spy here all summer. It’s
a thankless thing, spying on people.”
“It is that,” I agreed soberly.
Hotchkiss and I arrived in Washington late that evening,
and, rather than arouse the household, I went to the
club. I was at the office early the next morning
and admitted myself. McKnight rarely appeared
before half after ten, and our modest office force
some time after nine. I looked over my previous
day’s mail and waited, with such patience as
I possessed, for McKnight. In the interval I
called up Mrs. Klopton and announced that I would dine
at home that night. What my household subsists
on during my numerous absences I have never discovered.
Tea, probably, and crackers. Diligent search
when I have made a midnight arrival, never reveals
anything more substantial. Possibly I imagine
it, but the announcement that I am about to make a
journey always seems to create a general atmosphere
of depression throughout the house, as though Euphemia
and Eliza, and Thomas, the stableman, were already
subsisting, in imagination, on Mrs. Klopton’s
meager fare.
