Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/226

198 possible that this stone," he handed it back, "told her who was in the room and that it was a woman who could come between you and your ward?"

"Scarcely, Mr. Trant!" Pierce flushed. "You can dismiss that absolutely. I told you a moment ago, when trying to think who could have come to ruin my work, that I have no enemy—least of all a woman enemy. Nor have I a single woman intimate, even a friend, whom Iris could possibly think of in that way."

"Will you take me, then, to the rooms where these things happened?" Trant rose abruptly.

"This is the way the woman must have come," Pierce indicated as he pointed Trant into the hall and let him see the arrangement of the house before he led him on.

The young psychologist, from his exterior view of the place, had already gained some idea of the interior arrangement; but as he followed Pierce from the library down the main hall, he was impressed anew by the individuality of the rambling structure. The main body of the house, he saw, had evidently been built some forty or fifty years ago, before Lake Forest had become the most fashionable and wealthy suburb to the north of Chicago; but the wings had been added later, one apparently to keep pace with the coming of the more pretentious country homes about it, the other more particularly to provide place for exhibiting the owner's immense collection of Central American curiosities.

So the wide entrance hall, running half-way through the house, divided at the center into the hallways