Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/334

314 me a vague sinking feeling in the region where I had so recently pinned Wendy Washburn's bunch of violets.

"You don't mean he's—he's trying to make you marry him?" I asked, with a sort of in-this-way-madness-lies clutch at my bosom.

That morose-eyed young woman sat studying my face for a moment or two. The incredulity which she must have beheld on it seemed to do away with her hesitation.

"Yes," she finally admitted.

I don't know whether I had really expected that or not, but when it came it made me blink a little, the same as you blink when a forty-candle power bulb is suddenly turned on in front of you. Then, thin and sweet, above all the tumult of the discoveries that were roaring like machinery about my dusty brain, a voice of relief kept repeating that Wendy Washburn was still an unmarried man, kept repeating it insistently, foolishly, like a song-sparrow on the eaves of a busy cotton-mill.

"And everything that's been happening in that awful house in town," I limply inquired, "has all that happened just because of this?"

"Wendy," she declared, "was at the bottom of everything!"