“It is impossible,” I broke in.  “Mr. Jamieson, do you know what your words imply?  Do you know that you are practically accusing Gertrude Innes of admitting that man?”

“Not quite that,” he said, with his friendly smile.  “In fact, Miss Innes, I am quite certain she did not.  But as long as I learn only parts of the truth, from both you and her, what can I do?  I know you picked up something in the flower bed:  you refuse to tell me what it was.  I know Miss Gertrude went back to the billiard-room to get something, she refuses to say what.  You suspect what happened to the cuff-link, but you won’t tell me.  So far, all I am sure of is this:  I do not believe Arnold Armstrong was the midnight visitor who so alarmed you by dropping—­shall we say, a golf-stick?  And I believe that when he did come he was admitted by some one in the house.  Who knows—­it may have been—­Liddy!”

I stirred my tea angrily.

“I have always heard,” I said dryly, “that undertakers’ assistants are jovial young men.  A man’s sense of humor seems to be in inverse proportion to the gravity of his profession.”

“A man’s sense of humor is a barbarous and a cruel thing, Miss Innes,” he admitted.  “It is to the feminine as the hug of a bear is to the scratch of—­well;—­anything with claws.  Is that you, Thomas?  Come in.”

Thomas Johnson stood in the doorway.  He looked alarmed and apprehensive, and suddenly I remembered the sealskin dressing-bag in the lodge.  Thomas came just inside the door and stood with his head drooping, his eyes, under their shaggy gray brows, fixed on Mr. Jamieson.

“Thomas,” said the detective, not unkindly, “I sent for you to tell us what you told Sam Bohannon at the club, the day before Mr. Arnold was found here, dead.  Let me see.  You came here Friday night to see Miss Innes, didn’t you?  And came to work here Saturday morning?”

For some unexplained reason Thomas looked relieved.

“Yas, sah,” he said.  “You see it were like this:  When Mistah Armstrong and the fam’ly went away, Mis’ Watson an’ me, we was lef’ in charge till the place was rented.  Mis’ Watson, she’ve bin here a good while, an’ she warn’ skeery.  So she slep’ in the house.  I’d bin havin’ tokens—­I tol’ Mis’ Innes some of ’em—­an’ I slep’ in the lodge.  Then one day Mis’ Watson, she came to me an’ she sez, sez she, ’Thomas, you’ll hev to sleep up in the big house.  I’m too nervous to do it any more.’  But I jes’ reckon to myself that ef it’s too skeery fer her, it’s too skeery fer me.  We had it, then, sho’ nuff, and it ended up with Mis’ Watson stayin’ in the lodge nights an’ me lookin’ fer work at de club.”

“Did Mrs. Watson say that anything had happened to alarm her?”