Burton recognized the point of view, but he did not feel that it solved his own problem. Miss Underwood would have to be very pretty indeed, if her personal charms were to cover the multitude of her family's sins.

"Are there any specific charges against them?" he asked.

"Not exactly. It's more a feeling in the air. There's a good deal of talk about his keeping a cripple shut up upstairs in his house. He's the son of the housekeeper,--Ben Bussey is his name. Kept him there for years. Mrs. Bussey says he ain't treated right."

"That might be investigated, I should think. Anything else?"

"A few months ago an old man died while the doctor was attending him. There was some talk about poison in his medicine."

"Was anything done about investigating it?"

"No, it just dropped. Nobody exactly likes to tackle the doctor. They're afraid. That old man had been complaining about his treatment, and then he died, and there are people who say that something is sure to happen to anybody that says anything against the doctor. This Orton Selby, now, had been making a lot of talk about old man Means' death, saying it was malpractice, if nothing worse, and that something ought to be done about it; and then last Friday he was held up. Somehow it always seems to happen the same way. That's what makes people talk."

"What specific reason is there for connecting the doctor with the robbery?"

"Well, it is known that the doctor was not far from Crescent Terrace at the time, for some one saw him driving very fast from that locality a few minutes later. It was in the dusk of evening. The man that held Selby up was masked by having a handkerchief tied over his face, with slits cut in it to see through, but Selby says he was the size and height of the doctor, and walked like him. But the closest point is that after he left Selby, with his hands tied above his head to the railing that runs along the Terrace, Selby saw him pick up a gray cloak from the ground and throw it over his arm as he walked off."

"Well?"

"The doctor commonly wears a gray cloak, something like a military cape. Nobody ever saw any one else wear another just like it. Everybody knows him at sight by his gray cloak."

"But he wasn't wearing it."

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