Later I heard about his part in the search that night. He had clung to the theory that Evans had gone for a night stroll, and he had combed the surrounding estates and woods for him. Since his boyhood he and Evans had had a signal, a whistle of their own. When Tony was out late and did not want Maud to know, he would use it; for Evans carried his revolver at night, and was a bit on the handy side with it. Tony had, I gathered, gone whistling through the night, without result.

By morning the situation began to look sinister. There was no question but that the old man had left voluntarily. His window was open and his pajamas neatly folded on a chair. But he had been in bed. The night nurse reported him sound asleep at half past ten.

“What it looks like,” said Tony, eating a hasty breakfast and looking harassed and weary, “is that he got some sort of message that took him out. Not by telephone. He wasn’t called. But his window was up. Someone might have spoken to him from the path below.”

“But who?” I asked. “Who on earth would want to take him away or—hurt him?”

“We don’t know he’s hurt. As to who took him away, he might have had his own reasons for leaving. The police had been talking to him, and he may have known something he shouldn’t have known. He might have been scared.”

There was no sign of him by noon. We had kept the news from Maud, but Bessie, having learned he was still missing, immediately went into what Amy Richards, reporting to me, called a tailspin.

“She’s packing up to leave,” she said cheerfully. “Thank God for His mercies. I’ve never seen her breakfast tray pass without being tempted to put something in her coffee.”

The police, local and city, did all the usual things that day: sent out radio descriptions of Evans, notified the Missing Persons Bureau, and got his fingerprints from his room at the hospital. But Bessie did not get away, after all. It was the saturnine Hopper who stopped that, sitting in the library and referring now and then to a small black book he carried.

“We’re still investigating a murder,” he told her. “It took place here, at the Cloisters. I am not insinuating that you know anything about it. But I am going to ask you a question. Why did you leave the country club that night? And walk in this direction? Don’t tell me you didn’t. I know you did.”

She went pale, but she was defiant. “I deny it absolutely,” she said.

“That’s very foolish of you,” he observed calmly. “We have your footprints here and there, and—”

“Rot! All women’s evening slippers are the same.”

“And we have a small bunch of artificial flowers that you lost out of your hair that night,” he went on. “That was when you ducked under the shrubbery down near the stables here. Do you remember? Now, Mrs. Wainwright, I want to know just where you went that night, and why.”