I cheered her as best I could.

“Jim Conway says it was only a vagrant looking for a place to sleep,” I told her. “Evans probably surprised him and he knocked him out. It couldn’t be anything else, Maud. There was nothing to steal there.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “Tell Tony to see me when he comes back, Pat.”

I waited up to tell him. Then I went along to my rooms. Not to bed, however. Looking out, I saw the entire place covered with what looked like gigantic fireflies and realized that Jim was still looking for Evans’s trousers and the keys. To do so he had apparently enlisted the entire male staff, including the gardeners, chauffeurs, and stablemen. But it was not until the next day that a caddy at the club, searching in the rough for a lost golf ball, found the trousers in a damp heap between the tenth and eleventh holes. The keys were gone.

By that time Jim Conway had rounded up every vagrant along the railroad for miles in both directions. He said later that he made an astonishing collection of pants in every stage of age and condition. None of them showed any signs of having been in what the press referred to as the Cloisters’ million-dollar pool, but in the hospital Evans, slowly recovering consciousness, was able to tell why they were missing.

The keys, he said, had been padlocked to a thin steel chain which ran like a belt around his waist. It ran through the belt straps, and unless there was a knife handy to cut it loose, it could only be taken with the trousers. This was borne out by the fact that when the trousers were found the straps had been neatly cut. So the keys were gone, as well as the revolver Evans had carried in a shoulder holster.

We did not tell Maud that someone unknown now had possession, not only of a gun but of the keys to the Cloisters. But within a day or two all the doors on the lower floor of the house had chains to supplement the locks, and Tony himself made a careful round, night after night to see that they were fastened.

That is the way things stood with us toward the end of August of last year. Maud was slowly improving, sitting sometimes in the evening on that roof garden of hers and gazing at the sunset over the river. But something had gone out of her, her vast zest for life, even her physical vitality. Tony often sat there with her in the evenings. It seemed to me that he was watching her, although he was as casual as ever on the surface.

“How about a shawl, old girl? Night’s getting chilly.”

To amuse her he brought her the local gossip. The greens committee at the country club was talking about eliminating the steep grade at the tenth hole. Theodore Earle was selling his Florida house. And one night he told her that there was a rumor that Bill Sterling and Lydia were supposed to be marrying that autumn, and that Audrey was raising hell about it.