Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/219

Rh rounded me I became conscious of several things. The first was that I was in a smaller car than before, a sort of single-seated covered roadster or coupé. The second was that the rain was now coming down in a steady pour, making the empty streets look like a city of the dead. The third was that the car in which I had been half-asleep had come to a stop. And the last one was that my Hero-Man was speaking to me.

"I'm sorry to disturb you," he was saying. "But it would be as well for you to wait here in the car until I come back."

"Back from where?" I asked, as he stepped out the car door with the club-bag in his hand.

"From there," he answered, pointing toward a wide-fronted house of Indiana limestone. Each barred window of that house was shrouded and curtained. Not a light shone from it. Even the street door stood ominously dark. But it was none of these things that left me suddenly wide awake.

It was the discovery that directly across the street from where we had stopped stood the very house from which I had fled two hours earlier. It was the discovery that Wendy Washburn had been able to thread his way back to that house of intrigue,