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Updated: June 4, 2025
"And how was she dressed?" "Just as Miss Ferguson has described." "Did she bring her hand-bag to your house?" "Yes, and left it there. We found it in her room after she was gone." "Indeed! And how do you account for that?" "She was preoccupied. I saw it in her cheerfulness, which was forced and not always well timed." "And where is that bag now?" "Mr. Van Burnam has it.
"New York is a large place, and much can take place in it without comment. Franklin Van Burnam and his sister-in-law met and went together to the Hotel D without being either recognized or suspected till later developments drew attention to them.
She enjoyed the game she was playing, and wished to make as much of it as possible." "Were her own garments much richer than those she ordered from Altman's?" "Undoubtedly. Mrs. Van Burnam wore nothing made by American seamstresses. Fine clothes were her weakness." "I see, I see; but why such an attempt on your part to keep yourself in the background?
I excused him at the time, but I will not perpetuate his forgetfulness in these pages. "She is still lying as we found her," Mr. Gryce now proceeded in his quiet, almost fatherly way. "Will you not take a look at her? Perhaps you can tell us who she is?" "I?" Mr. Van Burnam seemed quite shocked. "How should I know her! Some thief probably, killed while meddling with other people's property."
But I did nothing till noon, when going into my rear garden and observing that the back windows of the Van Burnam house were as closely shuttered as the front, I became so anxious that I stopped the next policeman I saw going by, and telling him my suspicions, urged him to ring the bell. No answer followed the summons. "There is no one here," said he. "Ring again!" I begged.
I looked upon this display of feeling as the mere gush of two over-excited young women, and was therefore somewhat astonished when I was interrupted in my afternoon nap by an announcement that the two Misses Van Burnam awaited me in the parlor. Going down, I saw them standing there hand in hand and both as white as a sheet.
Franklin Van Burnam appeared in the hall, just as Mr. Silas Van Burnam, his father, stepped into the vestibule. "Father!" he remonstrated, with a troubled air; "could you not wait?" The elder gentleman, who had evidently just been driven up from the steamer, wiped his forehead with an irascible air, that I will say I had noticed in him before and on much less provocation.
I say it's all a muddle, ma'am, and it will be a smart man as can explain it." "Or a smart woman," I thought. "Did I do wrong, ma'am? That's what plagues me. She begged so hard to come in, I didn't know how to shut the door on her. Besides her name was Van Burnam, or so she told me." Here was a coil.
"That he continued in this frame of mind, and that he never lost confidence in the precautions he had taken and in the mystery with which the deed was surrounded, is apparent from the fact that he revisited the Van Burnam office on the following morning, and hung again on its accustomed nail the keys of the Gramercy Park house.
Burnam hurrying out of the room, in search of a corner where she could laugh unseen. Surely, since the days of Topsy, the immortal, there was never such an imp as Janey. Mrs. Burnam declared that she was as good as a tonic, and Mr. Burnam made no secret of his enjoyment of her antics, which were always as original as they were unexpected.
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