Page:Arthur Stringer--The House of Intrigue.djvu/359

339 peered out through the aperture. And for the life of me I couldn't keep from laughing as I squinted up at those two apprehensive old faces. They made me think of a couple of white mice peering out between the bars of a cage. For I saw at a glance that it was old Ezra Bartlett and his brother Enoch. Those two old brothers, however, now looked more than worried. They looked unhappy and harried and altogether uncertain as to what new calamity was about to befall them. And I feel quite sure they would have slammed and locked that door in our faces, had not Clarissa Bartlett been a little too quick for them. She defeated that intention, as book agents do, by occupying the door-opening with her own slender body.

"Come on!" she commanded, with a motion over her shoulder to me, for she was already in through the door by this time and silently but deliberately defying any movement to close it.

I none too willingly followed her into that house of complicated uncertainties. She strode across the hall and opened a door on the right. Then she made a motion toward the two timorous-eyed old spirits hovering about in the shadowy background.

"I'd like the three of you to wait in here until I come down," she announced in what I was begin-