“No, ma’m, Miss Innes.”  She had a nervous habit of looking first at my one eye and then at the other, her own optics shifting ceaselessly, right eye, left eye, right eye, until I found myself doing the same thing.  “No, ma’m.  I was askin’ did you want the ladder left up the clothes chute?”

“The what?” I screeched, and was sorry the next minute.  Seeing her suspicions were verified, Mary Anne had gone white, and stood with her eyes shifting more wildly than ever.

“There’s a ladder up the clothes chute, Miss Innes,” she said.  “It’s up that tight I can’t move it, and I didn’t like to ask for help until I spoke to you.”

It was useless to dissemble; Mary Anne knew now as well as I did that the ladder had no business to be there.  I did the best I could, however.  I put her on the defensive at once.

“Then you didn’t lock the laundry last night?”

“I locked it tight, and put the key in the kitchen on its nail.”

“Very well, then you forgot a window.”

Mary Anne hesitated.

“Yes’m,” she said at last.  “I thought I locked them all, but there was one open this morning.”

I went out of the room and down the hall, followed by Mary Anne.  The door into the clothes chute was securely bolted, and when I opened it I saw the evidence of the woman’s story.  A pruning-ladder had been brought from where it had lain against the stable and now stood upright in the clothes shaft, its end resting against the wall between the first and second floors.

I turned to Mary.

“This is due to your carelessness,” I said.  “If we had all been murdered in our beds it would have been your fault.”  She shivered.  “Now, not a word of this through the house, and send Alex to me.”

The effect on Alex was to make him apoplectic with rage, and with it all I fancied there was an element of satisfaction.  As I look back, so many things are plain to me that I wonder I could not see at the time.  It is all known now, and yet the whole thing was so remarkable that perhaps my stupidity was excusable.

Alex leaned down the chute and examined the ladder carefully.

“It is caught,” he said with a grim smile.  “The fools, to have left a warning like that!  The only trouble is, Miss Innes, they won’t be apt to come back for a while.”

“I shouldn’t regard that in the light of a calamity,” I replied.

Until late that evening Halsey and Alex worked at the chute.  They forced down the ladder at last, and put a new bolt on the door.  As for myself, I sat and wondered if I had a deadly enemy, intent on my destruction.

I was growing more and more nervous.  Liddy had given up all pretense at bravery, and slept regularly in my dressing-room on the couch, with a prayer-book and a game knife from the kitchen under her pillow, thus preparing for both the natural and the supernatural.  That was the way things stood that Thursday night, when I myself took a hand in the struggle.