Page:The Indian Drum (1917 original).pdf/91

Rh probably, of the morning she had gone away, left where her maid or she herself had laid them, and only picked up and put back there at the times since when the room was dusted. As Alan touched them, he saw that his fingers left marks in the dust on the smooth top of the chest; he noticed that some one else had touched the things and made marks of the same sort as he had made. The freshness of these other marks startled him; they had been made within a day or so. They could not have been made by Sherrill, for Alan had noticed that Sherrill's hands were slender and delicately formed; Corvet, too, was not a large man; Alan's own hand was of good size and powerful, but when he put his fingers over the marks the other man had made, he found that the other hand must have been larger and more powerful than his own. Had it been Corvet's servant? It might have been, though the marks seemed too fresh for that; for the servant, Sherrill had said, had left the day Corvet's disappearance was discovered.

Alan pulled open the drawers to see what the other man might have been after. It had not been the servant; for the contents of the drawers—old brittle lace and woman's clothing—were tumbled as though they had been pulled out and roughly and inexpertly pushed back; they still showed the folds in which they had lain for years and which recently had been disarranged.

This proof that some one had been prying about in the house before himself and since Corvet had gone, startled Alan and angered him. It brought him suddenly a sense of possession which he had not been able to feel when Sherrill had told him the house was his; it brought an impulse of protection of these things about him. Who had been searching in Benjamin Corvet's—in