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He grinned in extenuation of the unaccountable failure of a small-town man to acquaint himself with all available facts regarding a neighbor's private affairs. "But then she never wasn't much of a hand, Mrs. Vinsolving wasn't, for mixing with folks. I'll say she wasn't!" Back she turned to seek out Searle, he of up-to-date real estate.
To the letter was a polite preamble. She skipped it. We may do well to follow her lead and come to the body of it, which ran like this: "Mrs. Janet Vinsolving is the widow of a colonel in our Regular Army. My information is that she is a woman of culture and refinement.
Her daughter, she alleged, had without warning developed a homicidal tendency aimed at the applicant. "According to Mrs. Vinsolving, the girl, who always theretofore had been a devoted and affectionate child, had made at least five separate and distinct attempts to kill her, first by putting poison into her food and later by attempting to strangle her at night in her bed.
And when it developed that I had come to inquire about the cause of all the excitement every old-lady boarder in the house wanted to tell me about it all at the same time. "It seems that three days ago this Mrs. Vinsolving applied at the place for room and board. Mrs. Sheehan vaguely remembered her as having been her guest for a short time ten or twelve years ago.
The outcome of her visit to him and his enthusiastic admiration for her was that the district attorney of Westchester County shortly thereafter instituted an investigation, the chief fruitage of that investigation being embodied in a somewhat longish letter from him, which Miss Smith read in her studio apartment one afternoon perhaps three weeks after the date of her meeting on trainboard with that adjudged maniac, the girl Margaret Vinsolving.
Vinsolving told her this story: "She said she had discovered a conspiracy to murder her, headed by guess who? The late Kaiser, no less! She said that the Kaiser in disguise had escaped from Holland, leaving behind him in his recent place of exile over there a double made up to look like him, and was now in hiding in this country for the sole purpose of having Mrs.
Well, go on, why don't you? You were speaking of the Vinsolving girl. Well, what of her?" "I was saying that I had interested myself in her case and " He snapped in: "One moment. Let's get this all straightened out before we start. May I inquire if you are closely related to the young person in question?" "I am not. I never saw her but once."
I have a perfectly proper motive, I think, in inquiring into her case. What is her name." "Margaret Vinsolving." "Spell it for me, please the last name?" He spelled it out, and she after him to fix it in her mind. "Where does she live I mean where is her home?" "Village of Pleasantdale, this state," shortly. "Who are her people?" "She's got a mother and that's all, far as I know."
"Perhaps it is symptomatic of a lesion in my brain that I should be concerning myself in the case of a strange girl whom I have seen but once is that also in your thoughts, Doctor McGlore?" "We'll waive that," he said. "For the sake of argument we'll concede that your indicative peculiarities assume a harmless phase at present. But this Vinsolving girl's case is different hers were not harmless.
"Did you hear anywhere any mention made of a daughter the red-haired child of twelve years ago?" inquired Miss Smith. "To be sure I did, but I'd forgotten about her," said Mullinix. "Mrs. Sheehan told me that somewhere in her excited narrative Mrs. Vinsolving did say something about the daughter. As nearly as I can recall, she told Mrs.
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