impatient.

"There's three men a-coming in at the gate. Shall I let loose the dog?"

"Go and let them in, you idiot. You will make Mr. Burton think that we have no visitors. Don't keep them waiting outside. They didn't come to study the architecture of the façade. Bring them here,--here to this room, do you understand?"

Mrs. Bussey departed, muttering something under her breath that evidently expressed her bewildered disapproval of this break in the familiar routine of life, and Dr. Underwood looked up at Burton with his peculiar grin, which might mean: amusement or embarrassment or any other emotion that he wanted to conceal.

"My investigating committee," he said.

 

 

 

 

 CHAPTER V

THE INVESTIGATING COMMITTEE

 

If Dr. Underwood awaited his investigating committee with any special anxiety, his mobile face did not show it. Burton read excitement, interest, even satirical amusement in it, but nothing like dread. But surprise and disapproval came into it when the door opened abruptly and Leslie entered.

"I'm going to hear what they have to say," she announced.

"Now, see here, Leslie, it's bad enough to have a daughter bothering a man to death in his own home, but when she begins to tag him around in public affairs, so that he can't even meet a committee of his neighbors who want to search his study in order to arrest him for highway robbery without having her putting herself in evidence, it becomes a regular nuisance. You go back to your spinning-wheel."

"You neglected to bring me up to a spinning-wheel, father."

"You go back to your mother."

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