“Why, Uncle Amos has a private elevator of his own. He went down in that!”

“Where is it?” asked Manning.

“I don’t know,” and Olive looked about the room. “And Uncle forbade me ever to mention it,—but this is an emergency, isn’t it? and I’m justified,—don’t you think?”

“Yes,” said Manning; “tell all you know.”

“But that’s all I do know. There is a secret elevator that nobody knows about. Surely you can find it.”

“Surely we can!” said I, and jumping up, I began the search.

Nor did it take long. There were not very many places where a private entrance could be concealed, and I found it behind the big war map, in the third room.

The door was flush with the wall, and painted the same as the panel itself. The map simply hung on the door, but overlapped sufficiently to hide it. Thus the door was concealed, though not really difficult of discovery.

“It won’t open,” I announced after a futile trial.

“Automatic,” said Talcott. “You can’t open that kind, when the car is down.”

“How do you know the car is down?” I asked.

“Because the door won’t open. Well, it does seem probable that Mr. Gately went away by this exit, then.”

“And the woman, too,” remarked Norah.

As before Mr. Talcott didn’t object to Norah’s participation in our discussion, in fact, he seemed rather to welcome it, and in a way, deferred to her opinions.

“Perhaps so,” he assented. “Now, Miss Raynor, where does this elevator descend to? I mean, where does it open on the ground floor?”

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” and the girl looked perplexed. “I’ve never been up or down in it. I shouldn’t have known of it, but once Uncle let slip a chance reference to it, and when I asked him about it, he told me, but told me not to tell. You see, he uses it to get away from bores or people he doesn’t want to see.”

“It ought to be easy to trace its shaft down through the floors,” said Amory Manning. “Though I suppose there’s no opening on any floor until the street 

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