Again she looked round the room and slowly, out of her dreams, emerged a few tangible facts. She was still in a state of bewilderment when the door opened and Aunt Alma came in, and the unprepossessing face of her relative was accentuated by her look of anxiety.
“Hullo, Alma!” said Mirabelle dully. “I’ve had such a queer dream.”
Alma pressed her lips tightly together as she placed a tray on a table by the side of the bed.
“I think it was about that advertisement I saw.” And then, with a gasp: “How did I come here?”
“They brought you,” said Alma. “The nurse is downstairs having her breakfast. She’s a nice woman and keeps press-cuttings.”
“The nurse?” asked Mirabelle in bewilderment.
“You arrived here at three o’clock in the morning in a motorcar. You had a nurse with you.” Alma enumerated the circumstances in chronological order. “And two men. First one of the men got out and knocked at the door. I was worried to death. In fact, I’d been worried all the afternoon, ever since I had your wire telling me not to come up to London.”
“But I didn’t send any such wire,” replied the girl.
“After I came down, the man—he was really a gentleman and very pleasantly spoken—told me that you’d been taken ill and a nurse had brought you home. They then carried you, the two men and the nurse, upstairs and laid you on the bed, and nurse and I undressed you. I simply couldn’t get you to wake up: all you did was to talk about the orangeade.”
“I remember! It was so bitter, and Lord Evington let me drink some of his. And then I … I don’t know what happened after that,” she said, with a little grimace.
“Mr. Gonsalez ordered the car, got the nurse from a nursing home,” explained Alma.
“Gonsalez! Not my Gonsalez—the—the Four Just Men Gonsalez?” she asked in amazement.
“I’m sure it was Gonsalez: they made no secret about it. You can see the gentlemen who brought you: he’s about the house somewhere. I saw him in Heavytree Lane not five minutes ago, strolling up and down and smoking. A pipe,” added Alma.
The girl got out of bed; her knees were curiously weak under her, but she managed to stagger to the window, and, pushing open the casement still farther, looked out across the patchwork quilt of colour. The summer flowers were in bloom; the delicate scents came up on the warm morning air, and she stood for a moment, drinking in great draughts of the exquisite perfume, and then, with a sigh, turned back to the waiting Alma.
“I don’t know how it all happened and what it’s about, but my word, Alma, I’m glad to be back! That dreadful man … ! We lunched at the Ritz-Carlton. … I never want to see another restaurant or a ballroom or Chester Square, or anything but old Heavytree!”
She took the cup of tea from Alma’s hand, drank greedily, and put it down with a little gasp.
“That was wonderful! Yes, the tea was too, but I’m thinking about Gonsalez. If it should be he!”
“I don’t see why you should get excited over a man who’s committed I don’t know how many murders.”
“Don’t be silly, Alma!” scoffed the girl. “The Just Men have never murdered, any more than a judge and jury murder.”
The room was still inclined to go round, and it was with the greatest difficulty that she could condense the two Almas who stood before her into one tangible individual.
“There’s a gentleman downstairs: he’s been waiting since twelve.”
And when she asked, she was to learn, to her dismay, that it was half-past one.
“I’ll be down in a quarter of an hour,” she said recklessly. “Who is it?”
“I’ve never heard of him before, but he’s a gentleman,” was the unsatisfactory reply. “They didn’t want to let him come in.”
“Who didn’t?”
“The gentlemen who brought you here in the night.”
Mirabelle stared at her.
“You mean … they’re guarding the house?”
“That’s how it strikes me,” said Alma bitterly. “Why they should interfere with us, I don’t know. Anyway, they let him in. Mr. Johnson Lee.”
The girl frowned.
“I don’t know the name,” she said.
Alma walked to the window.
“There’s his car,” she said, and pointed.
It was just visible, standing at the side of the road beyond the box hedge, a long-bodied Rolls, white with dust. The chauffeur was talking to a strange man, and from the fact that he was smoking a pipe Mirabelle guessed that this was one of her self-appointed custodians.
She had her bath, and with the assistance of the nurse, dressed and came shakily down the stairs. Alma was waiting in the brick-floored hall.
“He wants to see you alone,” she said in a stage whisper. “I don’t know whether I ought to allow it, but there’s evidently something wrong. These men prowling about the house have got thoroughly on my nerves.”
Mirabelle laughed softly as she opened the door and walked in. At the sound of the door closing, the man who was sitting stiffly on a deep settee in a window recess got up. He was tall and bent, and his dark face was lined. His eyes she could not see; they were hidden behind dark green glasses, which were turned in her direction as she came across the room to greet him.
“Miss Mirabelle Leicester?” he asked, in the quiet, modulated voice of an educated man. He took her hand in his.
“Won’t you sit down?” she said, for he remained standing after she had seated herself.
“Thank you.” He sat down gingerly, holding between his knees the handle of the umbrella he had brought into the drawing-room. “I’m afraid my visit may be inopportune, Miss Leicester,” he said. “Have you by any chance heard about Mr. Barberton?”
Her brows wrinkled in thought. “Barberton? I seem to have heard the name.”
“He was killed yesterday on
