While I was dressing for dinner, Liddy rapped at the door. She was hardly herself yet, but privately I think she was worrying about the broken mirror and its augury, more than anything else. When she came in she was holding something in her hand, and she laid it on the dressing-table carefully.
“I found it in the linen hamper,” she said. “It must be Mr. Halsey’s, but it seems queer how it got there.”
It was the half of a link cuff-button of unique design, and I looked at it carefully.
“Where was it? In the bottom of the hamper?” I asked.
“On the very top,” she replied. “It’s a mercy it didn’t fall out on the way.”
When Liddy had gone I examined the fragment attentively. I had never seen it before, and I was certain it was not Halsey’s. It was of Italian workmanship, and consisted of a mother-of-pearl foundation, encrusted with tiny seed-pearls, strung on horsehair to hold them. In the center was a small ruby. The trinket was odd enough, but not intrinsically of great value. Its interest for me lay in this: Liddy had found it lying in the top of the hamper which had blocked the east-wing stairs.
That afternoon the Armstrongs’ housekeeper, a youngish good-looking woman, applied for Mrs. Ralston’s place, and I was glad enough to take her. She looked as though she might be equal to a dozen of Liddy, with her snapping black eyes and heavy jaw. Her name was Anne Watson, and I dined that evening for the first time in three days.
III
Mr. John Bailey Appears
I had dinner served in the breakfast-room. Somehow the huge dining-room depressed me, and Thomas, cheerful enough all day, allowed his spirits to go down with the sun. He had a habit of watching the corners of the room, left shadowy by the candles on the table, and altogether it was not a festive meal.
Dinner over I went into the living-room. I had three hours before the children could possibly arrive, and I got out my knitting. I had brought along two dozen pairs of slipper soles in assorted sizes—I always send knitted slippers to the Old Ladies’ Home at Christmas—and now I sorted over the wools with a grim determination not to think about the night before. But my mind was not on my work: at the end of a half-hour I found I had put a row of blue scallops on Eliza Klinefelter’s lavender slippers, and I put them away.
I got out the cufflink and went with it to the pantry. Thomas was wiping silver and the air was heavy with tobacco smoke. I sniffed and looked around, but there was no pipe to be seen.
“Thomas,” I said, “you have been smoking.”
“No, ma’m.” He was injured innocence itself. “It’s on my coat, ma’m. Over at the club the gentlemen—”
But Thomas did not finish. The pantry was suddenly filled with the odor of singeing cloth. Thomas gave a clutch at his coat, whirled to the sink, filled a tumbler with water and poured it into his right pocket with the celerity of practice.
“Thomas,” I said, when he was sheepishly mopping the floor, “smoking is a filthy and injurious habit. If you must smoke, you must; but don’t stick a lighted pipe in your pocket again. Your skin’s your own: you can blister it if you like. But this house is not mine, and I don’t want a conflagration. Did you ever see this cufflink before?”
No, he never had, he said, but he looked at it oddly.
“I picked it up in the hall,” I added indifferently. The old man’s eyes were shrewd under his bushy eyebrows.
“There’s strange goin’s-on here, Mis’ Innes,” he said, shaking his head. “Somethin’s goin’ to happen, sure. You ain’t took notice that the big clock in the hall is stopped, I reckon?”
“Nonsense,” I said. “Clocks have to stop, don’t they, if they’re not wound?”
“It’s wound up, all right, and it stopped at three o’clock last night,” he answered solemnly. “More’n that, that there clock ain’t stopped for fifteen years, not since Mr. Armstrong’s first wife died. And that ain’t all—no ma’m. Last three nights I slep’ in this place, after the electrics went out I had a token. My oil lamp was full of oil, but it kep’ goin’ out, do what I would. Minute I shet my eyes, out that lamp’d go. There ain’t no surer token of death. The Bible sez, Let yer light shine!
When a hand you can’t see puts yer light out, it means death, sure.”
The old man’s voice was full of conviction. In spite of myself I had a chilly sensation in the small of my back, and I left him mumbling over his dishes. Later on I heard a crash from the pantry, and Liddy reported that Beulah, who is coal black, had darted in front of Thomas just as he picked up a tray of dishes; that the bad omen had been too much for him, and he had dropped the tray.
The chug of the automobile as it climbed the hill was the most welcome sound I had heard for a long time, and with Gertrude and Halsey actually before me, my troubles seemed over for good. Gertrude stood smiling in the hall, with her hat quite over one ear, and her hair in every direction under her pink veil. Gertrude is a very pretty girl, no matter how her hat is, and I was not surprised when Halsey presented a good-looking young man, who bowed at me and looked at Trude—that
