Louise arrived at Sunnyside and found the house rented.  Not knowing what to do, she sent for Arnold at the Greenwood Club, and told him a little, not all.  She told him that there was something wrong, and that the bank was about to close.  That his father was responsible.  Of the conspiracy she said nothing.  To her surprise, Arnold already knew, through Bailey that night, that things were not right.  Moreover, he suspected what Louise did not, that the money was hidden at Sunnyside.  He had a scrap of paper that indicated a concealed room somewhere.

His inherited cupidity was aroused.  Eager to get Halsey and Jack Bailey out of the house, he went up to the east entry, and in the billiard-room gave the cashier what he had refused earlier in the evening—­the address of Paul Armstrong in California and a telegram which had been forwarded to the club for Bailey, from Doctor Walker.  It was in response to one Bailey had sent, and it said that Paul Armstrong was very ill.

Bailey was almost desperate.  He decided to go west and find Paul Armstrong, and to force him to disgorge.  But the catastrophe at the bank occurred sooner than he had expected.  On the moment of starting west, at Andrews Station, where Mr. Jamieson had located the car, he read that the bank had closed, and, going back, surrendered himself.

John Bailey had known Paul Armstrong intimately.  He did not believe that the money was gone; in fact, it was hardly possible in the interval since the securities had been taken.  Where was it?  And from some chance remark let fall some months earlier by Arnold Armstrong at a dinner, Bailey felt sure there was a hidden room at Sunnyside.  He tried to see the architect of the building, but, like the contractor, if he knew of the such a room he refused any information.  It was Halsey’s idea that John Bailey come to the house as a gardener, and pursue his investigations as he could.  His smooth upper lip had been sufficient disguise, with his change of clothes, and a hair-cut by a country barber.

So it was Alex, Jack Bailey, who had been our ghost.  Not only had he alarmed—­Louise and himself, he admitted—­on the circular staircase, but he had dug the hole in the trunk-room wall, and later sent Eliza into hysteria.  The note Liddy had found in Gertrude’s scrap-basket was from him, and it was he who had startled me into unconsciousness by the clothes chute, and, with Gertrude’s help, had carried me to Louise’s room.  Gertrude, I learned, had watched all night beside me, in an extremity of anxiety about me.

That old Thomas had seen his master, and thought he had seen the Sunnyside ghost, there could be no doubt.  Of that story of Thomas’, about seeing Jack Bailey in the footpath between the club and Sunnyside, the night Liddy and I heard the noise on the circular staircase—­that, too, was right.  On the night before Arnold Armstrong was murdered, Jack Bailey had made his first attempt to search for the secret room.  He secured Arnold’s keys from his room at the club and got into the house, armed with a golf-stick for sounding the walls.  He ran against the hamper at the head of the stairs, caught his cuff-link in it, and dropped the golf-stick with a crash.  He was glad enough to get away without an alarm being raised, and he took the “owl” train to town.