“Yes.”

“Well, she’s a tramp if I ever saw one,” said Amy decisively, and took away my tray. “I thought they were divorced. What’s she doing here?”

“I don’t know.”

“She looks like pure poison to me,” said Amy, and put another compress on my leg.

Chapter Ten

THAT DAY, LIKE THE others that followed, brought nothing exciting. In the afternoon Maud appeared, with Hilda behind her carrying silk blanket and covers and pillow slips. She looked anxious, but she was businesslike and practical.

“The doctor thinks there is no break,” she said. “We’ll have an X-ray anyhow as soon as you can be moved. How on earth did it happen?”

I told her, but I did not mention the body I had fallen on, or the ladder. But that night I told Tony. He sat beside the bed, and I related the whole story. He was incredulous at first. He said the elevator people had left the elevator up and the power cut off; that the door to it was partly open, but that they had put a heavy hall chair in front of it and a sign to keep out.

“They weren’t there last night, Tony.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Positive.”

He drew a long breath. “Well, thank God you’re all right,” he said. “See here, Pat, are you absolutely sure you fell on somebody?” he asked. “After all, with a fall like that—”

“It grunted. And it moved. I never heard of a cellar floor doing that.”

“And what about this ladder business? Sure of that too?”

“I tried to pull myself up by it. Then I must have fainted again. When I came to it was gone.”

He sent for Jim Conway after that. I had to repeat the story to him, and he seemed to find part of it highly diverting.

“Even money we’ll find it was one of Bessie’s crowd,” he said. “The men had been carrying liquor from the cellar down to the playhouse, and they probably left the door open. Some drunk came along and wandered in. How does that sound?”

“It would be a lot funnier if someone wasn’t making a habit of breaking into this house,” I said crossly.

“Well, after this let Roger attend to his own troubles, especially at night,” he told me, and went away.

I know now that both Jim and Tony were deliberately making light of the affair that day. At the time, of course, it merely made me indignant. For one or two things came to light which bore out part of my story. Stevens admitted that the areaway door to the basement under the west wing had been standing open when he found me. There were indications that a car had been driven across the grass inside the gates and parked there behind the shrubbery. And Maud, interrogated by Tony, came out with a curious small incident which was to be more important than it seemed at the time.

Like myself, she had been unable to sleep, and just before I started downstairs with Roger the house telephone rang beside her bed. She had thought it was Bessie, calling from the playhouse, but when she answered it there was no one on the wire.