“Good Lord!” a man’s voice exclaimed, just beside me.  And then I collapsed.  I felt myself going, felt some one catch me, a horrible nausea—­that was all I remembered.

When I came to it was dawn.  I was lying on the bed in Louise’s room, with the cherub on the ceiling staring down at me, and there was a blanket from my own bed thrown over me.  I felt weak and dizzy, but I managed to get up and totter to the door.  At the foot of the circular staircase Mr. Winters was still asleep.  Hardly able to stand, I crept back to my room.  The door into Gertrude’s room was no longer locked:  she was sleeping like a tired child.  And in my dressing-room Liddy hugged a cold hot-water bottle, and mumbled in her sleep.

“There’s some things you can’t hold with hand cuffs,” she was muttering thickly.

CHAPTER XXIX

A SCRAP OF PAPER

For the first time in twenty years, I kept my bed that day.  Liddy was alarmed to the point of hysteria, and sent for Doctor Stewart just after breakfast.  Gertrude spent the morning with me, reading something—­I forget what.  I was too busy with my thoughts to listen.  I had said nothing to the two detectives.  If Mr. Jamieson had been there, I should have told him everything, but I could not go to these strange men and tell them my niece had been missing in the middle of the night; that she had not gone to bed at all; that while I was searching for her through the house, I had met a stranger who, when I fainted, had carried me into a room and left me there, to get better or not, as it might happen.

The whole situation was terrible:  had the issues been less vital, it would have been absurd.  Here we were, guarded day and night by private detectives, with an extra man to watch the grounds, and yet we might as well have lived in a Japanese paper house, for all the protection we had.

And there was something else:  the man I had met in the darkness had been even more startled than I, and about his voice, when he muttered his muffled exclamation, there was something vaguely familiar.  All that morning, while Gertrude read aloud, and Liddy watched for the doctor, I was puzzling over that voice, without result.

And there were other things, too.  I wondered what Gertrude’s absence from her room had to do with it all, or if it had any connection.  I tried to think that she had heard the rapping noises before I did and gone to investigate, but I’m afraid I was a moral coward that day.  I could not ask her.

Perhaps the diversion was good for me.  It took my mind from Halsey, and the story we had heard the night before.  The day, however, was a long vigil, with every ring of the telephone full of possibilities.  Doctor Walker came up, some time just after luncheon, and asked for me.

“Go down and see him,” I instructed Gertrude.  “Tell him I am out—­for mercy’s sake don’t say I’m sick.  Find out what he wants, and from this time on, instruct the servants that he is not to be admitted.  I loathe that man.”