Chapter XVI. I FACE FLANNIGAN

Dinner waited that night while everybody went to the coal cellar
and stared at the hole in the wall, and watched while Max took a
tracing of it and of some footprints in the coal dust on the
other side.

I did not go. I went into the library with the guilty watch in
the fold of my gown, and found Mr. Harbison there, staring
through the February gloom at the blank wall of the next house,
and quite unconscious of the reporter with a drawing pad just
below him in the area-way. I went over and closed the shutters
before his very eyes, but even then he did not move.

"Will you be good enough to turn around?" I demanded at last.

"Oh!" he said wheeling. "Are YOU here?"

There wasn't any reply to that, so I took the watch and placed it
on the library table between us. The effect was all that I had
hoped. He stared at it for an instant, then at me, and with his
hand outstretched for it, stopped.

"Where did you find it?" he asked. I couldn't understand his
expression. He looked embarrassed, but not at all afraid.

"I think you know, Mr. Harbison," I retorted.

"I wish I did. You opened it?"