Page:Anna Katharine Green - Leavenworth Case.djvu/202

192 I next asked myself how I was to establish these facts. Mr. Clavering’s life was as yet too little known to me to offer me any assistance; so, leaving it for the present, I took up the thread of Eleanore’s history, and found that at the time given me she had been in R, a fashionable watering-place in this State. Now, if his was true, and my theory correct, he must have been there also. To prove this fact, became, consequently, my first business. I resolved to go to R on the morrow.

But before proceeding in an undertaking of such importance, I considered it expedient to make such inquiries and collect such facts as the few hours I had left to work in rendered possible. I went first to the house of Mr. Gryce.

I found him lying upon a hard sofa, in the bare sitting-room I have before mentioned, suffering from a severe attack of rheumatism. His hands were done up in bandages, and his feet incased in multiplied folds of a dingy red shawl which looked as if it had been through the wars. Greeting me with a short nod that was both a welcome and an apology, he devoted a few words to an explanation of his unwonted position; and then, without further preliminaries, rushed into the subject which was uppermost in both our minds by inquiring, in a slightly sarcastic way, if I was very much surprised to find my bird flown when I returned to the Hoffman House that afternoon.

"I was astonished to find you allowed him to fly at this time," I replied. "From the manner in which you requested me to make his acquaintance, I supposed you considered him an important character in the tragedy which has just been enacted."

"And what makes you think I don’t? Oh, the fact