she demanded breathlessly. Her face was stained with tears, and her gold hair was ruffled around her sweet face. There was something fine and glorious in her eyes such as one sees in the eyes of a child who is in search of its mother.
A look passed between Sherwood and Chris, and back again. It said: "Did they get him?" Its answer: "They did. He is in custody." The miserable truth sat upon Chris’s nice-boy face written large. There was yearning tenderness in Sherwood’s eyes as he looked back at the slender girl in her little bright spring outfit, all rumpled now and a stain of water down the front where she had spilled it trying to make her father drink.
"He is not here just now," he temporized. "He had to go away. Will you not try to forget what part I had to play in all this and let me help you for the present?"
"Had to?" repeated the girl sharply, ignoring his offer. "Do you mean they took him away?" Her perceptions seemed suddenly sharply awake.
Sherwood looked at her compassionately. A flash passed between him and the boy again. She saw it.
"Have they?" she appealed to Chris.
He nodded miserably.
"Do you mean they have arrested my brother?" She turned back to Sherwood, her voice suddenly grown older, more mature.
Sherwood could only bow gravely.
"But—what for?"
"For complicity—with your father. They have acted together in this business——"
"Stop!" said Romayne, trying to speak calmly. "It is terrible for you to say such things with him lying up there!"
She caught her breath in a sob and hurried on: "But I want you to try to be sensible, and tell me what made you ever get an idea like this? You know you will have to prove a statement such as you have just made."
The young man bowed again.
"I’m very sorry, Miss Ransom, but it has been proved."
"Where is your proof?" she demanded, her eyes flashing with the restrained look of one who feels strong and sure of her position and can afford to hold her anger in abeyance until facts come to her rescue.
The young man looked at her sadly for a moment and then spoke.
"Miss Ransom, I would have spared you if I could, but I suppose you will have to know the truth sooner or later, although I would rather it were not my task to tell you. Can’t you be persuaded to take my word for it, and spare yourself the unpleasant details? No one has any wish to bring trouble upon you."
"I thought you could not prove your charges," flashed the girl, with bitter contempt in her tone. "You are a coward and afraid to face the truth!"
For answer Sherwood turned to her, his face hardening.
"Come then," he said half-bitterly. "I have warned you. It is your own fault if you have to suffer."
He stepped to the panel beside the beautiful carved mantel and touched a spring. The panel swung open and disclosed a set of shelves inside, shallow shelves, as she had told him a little while before, filled with papers fastened in neat bundles with rubber bands about them, official-looking documents, and each shelf labeled with letters of the alphabet. A gleam of triumph came in her eyes.
But even as it dawned, the young man silently touched what looked like a nail head, and the whole set of shelves, papers and all, began to move, slowly, smoothly, swinging around out of sight into a recess somewhere behind the mantel, leaving a dark opening into a cavern-like space beyond. It could not exactly be called a doorway, yet it was wide enough for a person to pass through.
Romayne stood staring in amazement and said nothing.
The young man reached his hand through the opening and touched a button, and a shaded light sprang up in the space beyond.
"Come!" he said, and with strange premonition Romayne followed him, stepping through the opening with a strange sensation of fright, yet unable to refuse to follow.
It was a room that she arrived in through the narrow door, a room with little attempt at beauty and luxury. There were tables and chairs, and pictures on the wall. Several of the chairs were pushed back as if their occupants had left them in a hurry. There was a lady’s glove upon the floor and a rose with a broken stem beside it. There were glasses on the tables and an odor of liquor faintly tanging the air. She looked toward the windows, doubting her exact location, and saw that they were closely and heavily curtained, and that the lamps were shrouded in dim draperies. Sherwood reached out and removed one shade, and the glare of electric light fell garishly over the place. A cupboard door half open he swung wide and disclosed rows and rows of bottles, with many labels. She did not try to read them all. Her eye caught one with terror-stricken gaze—Pure Rye Whiskey, it read. There were other names that meant nothing to her, vaguely associated in her mind with a world of which she knew little. She turned, bewildered, half questioning what he meant by it all, and why this should have anything to do with her father.
"Come!" said Sherwood again, setting his firm lips to the task he did not relish. Yet this girl must be convinced.
He led her through other rooms and showed her other closets filled with more bottles, and showed her cases half open, from which the bottles had not been removed, and more cases still in their wrappings. He let her read the labels, "Utopian Refining Company"—her father’s company!
And then he led her down a dark stairway into a dim cellar, where the lights were far apart and where she wandered after him through a maze of more packing cases, stopping now and then to make her read the painted lettering on their sides, and now and again to lift a lid and let her look within. They came at length to a large iron door that swung back mysteriously in the dim light, at a touch, and they stepped into what seemed a coal bin.
Stumbling after him and groping, her hand touched his, and she caught at it for support as she slipped over the loose coal.
"I must go back!" she gasped.
He caught her gently and held her firmly until she was on the smooth cement floor of the cellar again, and then he took a flashlight from his pocket and lighted the way around a strangely familiar furnace to another great packing case, whose half-open top disclosed great lumps of mineral that gleamed weirdly in the glow of the flashlight, and all at once she began to realize where she was. This was the packing case that had stood by the furnace for several weeks past. The young man lifted what seemed like the top of the case, and below were rows of bottles packed in straw. He lifted and flashed the light full into the lower compartment, then put it down again and led the way to the cellar stairs.
They mounted in silence, the girl ahead, her knees shaking weakly beneath her. The young man tried to steady her, but she drew away from him and went on by herself. So going they came once more into the wide hall and walked toward the front to the room from which they had started.
Romayne stood still for a moment, staring at the opening in the chimney panel, with the light still burning beyond and a glimpse of those awful bottles on their shelves, and then she sank into the big chair close by with a groan and covered her face with her hands.
CHAPTER IV
About
