fire and sat by it, musing over the events of the day and speculating on the probabilities of the story he had just listened to. Trying as that day had been he had no desire for sleep; his brain was actively at work on the problems that still required solution. He thought little about the disappearance of Philip Mortover—Philip, in his opinion, had made off to one of the adjacent inns on finding the cupboard locked and the key taken away, and there he had stayed and would probably be found. But the whereabouts of Levigne and Janet Clagne was a different matter. For he had learned enough by that time to know that there was a secret, dark and mysterious, between those two, and that whatever they were engaged in bore some sinister relationship to it.
Dark and mysterious—it struck him as he sat there by the blazing fire that everything about that old house, set there in the midst of the whirling snow, was as mysterious as it was dark. It was a place of secrets—and it looked it. He glanced around him at the queer and quaint quarters into which he and his companions had been so thankful to get—at the wide fireplace, with its ingle-nooks and black cavities; at the raftered roof; the ancient furniture, every stick of which he guaranteed to be two or three hundred years old, at least; at the
