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Down-stairs McKnight was still at the telephone, and amusing himself with Mrs. Klopton in the interval of waiting. "Why did he come home in a gray suit, when he went away in a blue?" he repeated. "Well, wrecks are queer things, Mrs. Klopton. The suit may have turned gray with fright. Or perhaps wrecks do as queer stunts as lightning.
I was determined, if possible, to make my next day's investigations without Johnson. In the meantime, even if it was for the last time, I would see Her that night. I gave Stogie a note for Mrs. Klopton, and with my dinner clothes there came back the gold bag, wrapped in tissue paper. Certain things about the dinner at the Dallas house will always be obscure to me.
Meals were cooked and, what's more, they were eaten; there was none of this 'here one day and gone the next' business." "Nonsense," I observed. "You're tired, that's all, Mrs. Klopton. And I wish you would go out; I want to bathe." "That's not all," she said with dignity, from the doorway.
So the occupant of lower seven had got on the car at Cresson, probably with Alison West and her companion. There was some one she cared about enough to shield. I went irritably to the door and summoned Mrs. Klopton. "You may throw out those roses," I said without looking at her. "They are quite dead." "They have been quite dead for three days," she retorted spitefully.
There was a second's indecision with the knob, then, judging discretion the better part, Mrs. Klopton went away. "Now, then," McKnight said, settling himself in a chair beside the bed, "spit it out. Not the wreck I know all I want about that. But the theft. I can tell you beforehand that it was a woman."
McKnight rarely appeared before half after ten, and our modest office force some time after nine. I looked over my previous day's mail and waited, with such patience as I possessed, for McKnight. In the interval I called up Mrs. Klopton and announced that I would dine at home that night. What my household subsists on during my numerous absences I have never discovered. Tea, probably, and crackers.
Euphemia had seen it first and called Mrs. Klopton. Together they had watched it breathlessly until it disappeared on the lower floor. "You should have been a writer of ghost stories," I said, giving my pillows a thump. "And so it was fitting flitfully!" "That's what it was doing," she reiterated. "Fitting flitfully I mean flitting fitfully how you do throw me out, Mr. Lawrence!
Klopton always lock themselves beyond reach of the bell at night, and put on a dressing-gown. The bell rang again on my way down-stairs. I lit the hall light and opened the door. I was wide-awake now, and I saw that it was Johnson. His bald head shone in the light his crooked mouth was twisted in a smile. "Good Heavens, man," I said irritably. "Don't you ever go home and go to bed?"
And what's more, it came again!" "Oh, come now, Mrs. Klopton," I objected, "ghosts are like lightning; they never strike twice in the same night. That is only worth half a cup of beef tea." "You may ask Euphemia," she retorted with dignity. "Not more than an hour after, there was a light there again. We saw it through the chinks of the shutters.
Klopton," I said wearily. "Somebody did, the general verdict seems to point my way." She stared at me in speechless indignation. Then she flounced out. She came back once to say that the paper predicted cooler weather, and that she had put a blanket on my bed, but, to her disappointment, I refused to reopen the subject. At half past eleven McKnight and Hotchkiss came in.
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