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!

CHAPTER XXXI

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?