With another warning to Mrs. Tate as to silence, we started back to Sunnyside.  So Fanny Armstrong knew of Lucien Wallace, and was sufficiently interested to visit him and pay for his support.  Who was the child’s mother and where was she?  Who was Nina Carrington?  Did either of them know where Halsey was or what had happened to him?

On the way home we passed the little cemetery where Thomas had been laid to rest.  I wondered if Thomas could have helped us to find Halsey, had he lived.  Farther along was the more imposing burial-ground, where Arnold Armstrong and his father lay in the shadow of a tall granite shaft.  Of the three, I think Thomas was the only one sincerely mourned.

CHAPTER XXVIII

A TRAMP AND THE TOOTHACHE

The bitterness toward the dead president of the Traders’ Bank seemed to grow with time.  Never popular, his memory was execrated by people who had lost nothing, but who were filled with disgust by constantly hearing new stories of the man’s grasping avarice.  The Traders’ had been a favorite bank for small tradespeople, and in its savings department it had solicited the smallest deposits.  People who had thought to be self-supporting to the last found themselves confronting the poorhouse, their two or three hundred dollar savings wiped away.  All bank failures have this element, however, and the directors were trying to promise twenty per cent. on deposits.

But, like everything else those days, the bank failure was almost forgotten by Gertrude and myself.  We did not mention Jack Bailey:  I had found nothing to change my impression of his guilt, and Gertrude knew how I felt.  As for the murder of the bank president’s son, I was of two minds.  One day I thought Gertrude knew or at least suspected that Jack had done it; the next I feared that it had been Gertrude herself, that night alone on the circular staircase.  And then the mother of Lucien Wallace would obtrude herself, and an almost equally good case might be made against her.  There were times, of course, when I was disposed to throw all those suspicions aside, and fix definitely on the unknown, whoever that might be.

I had my greatest disappointment when it came to tracing Nina Carrington.  The woman had gone without leaving a trace.  Marked as she was, it should have been easy to follow her, but she was not to be found.  A description to one of the detectives, on my arrival at home, had started the ball rolling.  But by night she had not been found.  I told Gertrude, then, about the telegram to Louise when she had been ill before; about my visit to Doctor Walker, and my suspicions that Mattie Bliss and Nina Carrington were the same.  She thought, as I did, that there was little doubt of it.

I said nothing to her, however, of the detective’s suspicions about Alex.  Little things that I had not noticed at the time now came back to me.  I had an uncomfortable feeling that perhaps Alex was a spy, and that by taking him into the house I had played into the enemy’s hand.  But at eight o’clock that night Alex himself appeared, and with him a strange and repulsive individual.  They made a queer pair, for Alex was almost as disreputable as the tramp, and he had a badly swollen eye.