The colonel thought he could wait till morning, and, a little comforted, hung up the receiver. Barely was it out of his hand when the bell shrilled again, sharply, vehemently. Winter put the tube to his ear.

“Does any one want Colonel Winter, Palace Hotel?” he asked.

A sweet, eager, boyish voice called back: “Uncle Bertie! Uncle Bertie, don’t you worry; I’m all right!”

“Archie!” cried the colonel. “Where are you?”

But there was no answer. He called again, and a second time; he told the lad that they were dreadfully anxious about him. He got no response[117] from the boy; but another voice, a woman’s voice, said, with cold distinctness, as if to some one in the room: “No, don’t let him; it is impossible!” Then a dead wall of silence and Central’s impassive ignorance. He could get nothing.

[117]

Rupert Winter stood a moment, frowning and thinking deeply. Directly, with a shrug of the shoulders, he walked out of his own outside door, locking it, and went straight to Miss Smith’s.

He knocked, at first very gently, then more vigorously. But there was no answer. He went away from the door, but he did not reënter his room. He did not bear to his aunt the news which, with all its meagerness and irritating incompleteness, had been an enormous relief to him. He simply waited in the corridor. Five minutes, ten minutes passed; then he heard the elevator whir, and, standing with his hand on the knob of his open door, he saw his aunt’s companion, dressed for the street, step out and speed down the corridor to her own door.

The other voice—the woman’s voice—had been Janet Smith’s.

[118]

CHAPTER VII THE HAUNTED HOUSE

A mud-splashed automobile runabout containing two men was turning off Van Ness Avenue down a narrower and shadier side street in the afternoon of the Sunday following the disappearance of Archie Winter. One of the occupants seemed to be an invalid whom the brilliant March sunshine had not tempted out of his heavy wrappings and cap; the other was a short, thick-set, corduroy-jacketed chauffeur. One marked the runabout at a glance as a hardly used livery motor-car; but a moment’s inspection might have shown that it was running with admirable smoothness and quiet. The chauffeur wore goggles, hence his eyes were shielded, but he turned 

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