hour before we organized a searching party to
look for her. Fred went up-stairs, and I took the lower floor.

It was I who found her, after all, lying full length on the grass in the
little square yard back of the house. She was in a dead faint, and she
was a much more difficult patient than Margery.

We could get no story from either of them that night. The two rooms had
been ransacked, but apparently nothing had been stolen. Fred vowed he
had locked and bolted the kitchen door, and that it had been opened from
within.

It was a strange experience, that night intrusion into the house,
without robbery as a motive. If Margery knew or suspected the reason for
the outrage, she refused to say. As for Mrs. Butler, to mention the
occurrence put her into hysteria. It was Fred who put forth the most
startling theory of the lot.

"By George," he said the next morning when we had failed to find tracks
in the yard, and Edith had reported every silver spoon in its place, "by
George, it wouldn't surprise me if the lady in the grave clothes did it
herself. There isn't anything a hysterical woman won't do to rouse your
interest in her, if it begins to flag. How did any one get in through
that kitchen door, when it was locked inside and bolted? I tell you, she
opened it herself."

I did not like to force Margery's confidence, but I believed that the
outrage was directly for the purpose of searching her room, perhaps for
papers that had been her father's. Mrs. Butler came around enough by
morning, to tell a semi-connected story in which she claimed that two
men had come in from a veranda roof, and tried to chloroform her. That
she had pretended to be asleep and had taken the first opportunity,
while they were in the other room, to run down-stairs and into the yard.
Edith thought it likely enough, being a credulous person.

As it turned out, Edith's intuition was more reliable than my
skepticism,--or Fred's.

CHAPTER XIX

BACK TO BELLWOOD

The inability of Margery Fleming to tell who had chloroformed her, and
Mrs. Butler's white face and brooding eyes made a very respectable
mystery out of the affair. Only Fred, Edith and I came down to breakfast
that morning. Fred's expression was half amused, half puzzled. Edith
fluttered uneasily over the coffee machine, her cheeks as red as the bow
of ribbon at her throat. I was preoccupied, and, like Fred, I propped
the morning paper in front of me and proceeded to think in its sh