The doctor kept a keen lookout, but no one appeared.
Once in a while he came over to me, and gave me a
reassuring pat on the shoulder.
“I never expected to come to this,” he
said once. “There’s one thing sure—I’ll
not be suspected of complicity. A doctor is
generally supposed to be handier at burying folks than
at digging them up.”
The uncanny moment came when Alex and Jamieson tossed
the spades on the grass, and I confess I hid my face.
There was a period of stress, I think, while the
heavy coffin was being raised. I felt that my
composure was going, and, for fear I would shriek,
I tried to think of something else—what
time Gertrude would reach Halsey—anything
but the grisly reality that lay just beyond me on
the grass.
And then I heard a low exclamation from the detective
and I felt the pressure of the doctor’s fingers
on my arm.
“Now, Miss Innes,” he said gently.
“If you will come over—”
I held on to him frantically, and somehow I got there
and looked down. The lid of the casket had been
raised and a silver plate on it proved we had made
no mistake. But the face that showed in the
light of the lantern was a face I had never seen before.
The man who lay before us was not Paul Armstrong!
BETWEEN TWO FIREPLACES
What with the excitement of the discovery, the walk
home under the stars in wet shoes and draggled skirts,
and getting up-stairs and undressed without rousing
Liddy, I was completely used up. What to do
with my boots was the greatest puzzle of all, there
being no place in the house safe from Liddy, until
I decided to slip upstairs the next morning and drop
them into the hole the “ghost” had made
in the trunk-room wall.
I went asleep as soon as I reached this decision,
and in my dreams I lived over again the events of
the night. Again I saw the group around the
silent figure on the grass, and again, as had happened
at the grave, I heard Alex’s voice, tense and
triumphant:
“Then we’ve got them,” he said.
Only, in my dreams, he said it over and over until
he seemed to shriek it in my ears.
I wakened early, in spite of my fatigue, and lay there
thinking. Who was Alex? I no longer believed
that he was a gardener. Who was the man whose
body we had resurrected? And where was Paul
Armstrong? Probably living safely in some extraditionless
country on the fortune he had stolen. Did Louise
and her mother know of the shameful and wicked deception?
What had Thomas known, and Mrs. Watson? Who
was Nina Carrington?
