bad," he muttered, "but you've been led astray, Miss
Butterworth,--excusably, I acknowledge, quite excusably, but yet in a
way to give you quite wrong conclusions. The secret of the Knollys
house--But wait a moment. Then you were not locked up in your room last
night?"

"Scarcely," I returned, wavering between the doubts he had awakened by
his first sentence and the surprise which his last could not fail to
give me.

"I might have known they would not be likely to catch you in a trap," he
remarked. "So you were up and in the halls?"

"I was up," I acknowledged, "and in the halls. May I ask where you
were?"

He paid no heed to the last sentence. "This complicates matters," said
he, "and yet perhaps it is as well. I understand you now, and in a few
minutes you will understand me. You thought it was Silly Rufus who was
buried last night. That was rather an awful thought, Miss Butterworth. I
wonder, with that in your mind, you look as well as you do this morning,
madam. Truly you are a wonderful woman--a very wonderful woman."

"A truce to compliments," I begged. "If you know as much as your words
imply of what went on in that ill-omened house last night, you ought to
show some degree of emotion yourself, for if it was not Silly Rufus who
was laid away under the Flower Parlor, who, then, was it? No one for
whom tears could openly be shed or of whose death public acknowledgment
could be made, or we would not be sitting here talking away at cross
purposes the morning after his burial."

"Tears are not shed or public acknowledgment made for the subject of a
half-crazy man's love for scientific investigation. It was no human
being whom you saw buried, madam, but a victim of Mr. Knollys' passion
for vivisection."

"You are playing with me," was my indignant answer; "outrageously and
inexcusably playing with me. Only a human being would be laid away in
such secrecy and with such manifestations of feeling as I was witness
to. You must think me in my dotage, or else----"

"We will take the rest of the sentence for granted," he dryly
interpolated. "You know that I can have no wish to insult your
intelligence, Miss Butterworth, and that if I advance a theory on my own
account I must have ample reasons for it. Now can you say the same for
yours? Can you adduce irrefutable proof that the body we buried last
night was that of a man? If you can, there is no more to be said, or,
rather, there is everything to be said, for this