The Chief Legatee. Anna Katharine Green
eyes of the officer and manager met in ill disguised alarm.
"She must have been under the most violent excitement to slip away without these," suggested the former. "I'd better be at work. Give me two hours," were his parting words to Mr. Ransom. "By that time I'll either be back or telephone you. You had better stay here; she may return. Though I don't think that likely," he muttered as he passed the manager.
At the door he stopped. "You can't tell me the color of that veil?"
"No."
"Look about the room, sir. There's lots of colors in the furniture and hangings. Don't you see one somewhere that reminds you of her veil or even of her dress?"
The miserable bridegroom looked up from the bag into which he was still staring and, glancing slowly around him, finally pointed at a chair upholstered in brown and impulsively said:
"The veil was like that; I remember now. Brown, isn't it? a dark brown?"
"Yes. And the dress?"
"I can't tell you a thing about the dress. But her gloves—I remember something about them. They were so tight they gaped open at the wrist. Her hands looked quite disfigured. I wondered that so sensible a woman should buy gloves at least two sizes too small for her. I think she was ashamed of them herself, for she tried to hide them after she saw me looking."
"This was in the cab?"
"Yes."
"Where you didn't speak a word?"
"Not a word."
"Though she seemed so very much cut up?"
"No, she didn't seem cut up; only tired."
"How tired?"
"She sat with her head pressed against the side of the cab."
"And a little turned away?"
"Yes."
"As if she shrank from you?"
"A little so."
"Did she brighten when the carriage stopped?"
"She started upright."
"Did you help her out?"
"No, I had promised not to touch her."
"She jumped out after you?"
"Yes."
"And never spoke?"
"Not a word."
Gerridge opened the door, motioned for the manager to follow, and, once in the hall, remarked to that gentleman:
"I should like to see the boy who took her bag and was with them when she slipped away."
CHAPTER II
THE LADY IN NUMBER THREE
The boy was soon found and proved to be more observing in matters of dress than Mr. Ransom. He described with apparent accuracy both the color and cut of the garments worn by the lady who had flitted away so mysteriously. The former was brown, all brown; and the latter was of the tailor-made variety, very natty and becoming. "What you would call 'swell,'" was the comment, "if her walk hadn't spoiled the hang of it. How she did walk! Her shoes must have hurt her most uncommon. I never did see any one hobble so."
"How's that? She hobbled, and her husband didn't notice it?"
"Oh, he had hurried on ahead. She was behind him, and she walked like this."
The pantomime was highly expressive.
"That's a point," muttered Gerridge. Then with a sharp look at the boy: "Where were you that you didn't notice her when she slipped off?"
"Oh, but I did, sir. I was waiting for the clerk to give me the key, when I saw her step back from the gentleman's side and, looking quickly round to see if any one was noticing her, slide off into the reception-room. I thought she wanted a drink of water out of the pitcher on the center-table, but if she did, she didn't come back after she had got it. None of us ever saw her again."
"Did you follow Mr. Ransom when he walked through those rooms?"
"No, sir; I stayed in the hall."
"Did the lady hobble when she slid thus mysteriously out of sight?"
"A little. Not so much as when she came in. But she wasn't at her ease, sir. Her shoes were certainly too small."
"I think I will take a peep at those rooms now," Gerridge remarked to the manager.
Mr. Loomis bowed, and together they crossed the office to the reception-room door. The diagram of this portion of the hotel will give you an idea of these connecting rooms.
There are three of them, as you will see, all reception-rooms. Mr. Ransom had passed through them all in looking for his wife. In No. 1 he found several ladies sitting and standing, all strangers. He encountered no one in No. 2, and in No. 3 just one person, a lady in street costume evidently waiting for some one. To this lady he had addressed himself, asking if she had seen any one pass that way the moment before. Her reply was a decided "No"; that she had been waiting in that same room for several minutes and had seen no one. This staggered him. It was as if his wife had dissolved into thin air. True, she might have eluded him by slipping out into the hall by means of door two at the moment he entered door one; and alert to this possibility, he hastened back into the hall to look for her. But she was nowhere visible, nor had she been observed leaving the building by the man stationed at entrance A. But there was another exit, that of B. Had she gone out that way? Mr. Ransom had taken pains to inquire and had been assured by the man in charge that no lady had left by that door during the last ten minutes. This he had insisted on, and when Mr. Loomis and the detective came in their turn to question him on this point he insisted on it again. The mystery seemed complete—at least to the manager. But the detective was not quite satisfied. He asked the man if at any time that day, before or after Mrs. Ransom's disappearance, he had swung the door open for a lady who walked lame. The answer was decisive. "Yes; one who walked as if her shoes were tight."
"When?"
"Oh a little while after the gentleman asked his questions."
"Was she dressed in brown?"
That he didn't know. He didn't look at ladies' dresses unless they were something special.
"But she walked lame and she came from Room 3?"
Yes. He remembered that much.
Gerridge, with a nod to the manager, stepped into the open compartment of the whirling door. "I'm off," said he. "Expect to hear from me in two hours."
At twenty minutes to ten Mr. Ransom was called up on the telephone.
"One question, Mr. Ransom."
"Hello, who are you?"
"Gerridge."
"All right, go ahead."
"Did you see the face of the woman you spoke to in Room No. 3?"
"Of course. She was looking directly at me."
"You remember it? Could identify it if you saw it again?"
"Yes; that is—"
"That's all, good-by."
The circuit was cut off.
Another intolerable wait. Then there came