“I wonder, Miss Rogers, whether you’d allow me to call on you some evening?”

Evelyn’s eyes popped open with the marvel of it.

“You mean you want to come and call on me?  Some evening?”

“If you will allow me.”

“Allow you?  Why, David Carroll—­I think you’re simply—­simply—­grandiloquent!  When will you come?”

“If your sister will permit—­”

“Bother Sis!  To-morrow night?”

“Yes, to-morrow night.”

She executed a few exuberant dance steps.

“Oh, what’ll the girls say when I tell ’em?”

Carroll climbed thoughtfully back into his car.  He saw Evelyn enter the house, but his thoughts were not with her.  He was thinking of the man who had just left.

Carroll never forgot faces, and he had recognized the visitor.

The man was William Barker, former valet to Roland Warren!

CHAPTER XI

LOOSE ENDS

Carroll’s forehead was seamed with thought as he turned his car townward and sent it hurtling through the frosty air.  He drove mechanically, scarcely knowing what he was doing.

He was frankly puzzled, enormously surprised and not a little startled.  The afternoon had been at first amusing, then interesting—­then utterly boring.  Evelyn’s chatter had put him in a state of mental coma—­a lethargy from which he had been rudely aroused at sight of William Barker leaving the residence of Evelyn Rogers’ sister.

There was something sinisterly significant in what he had seen.  Not for a moment did he entertain the idea that Barker had been seeking employment.  Negativing that possibility was the cold statement of the disinterested young girl that Barker had been there before, and, too, the fact that Barker was leaving from the front door instead of through the servant’s door.

Obviously, then, Barker’s mission had little to do with the matter of domestic employment.  And now that he had stumbled upon something tangible—­something definite—­certain salient facts which had come to him through the haze of girlish chatter began to stand out and assume proper significance.

For instance there was her constant repetition of the fact that Roland Warren had been a frequent visitor at the Lawrence home.  That might mean nothing:  it might mean a great deal.  Certainly it was indicative of a close friendship between the dead man and the members of that household.  He paid little heed to the girl’s protestations that Warren had been in love with her.  No expert in the ways of the rising generation, Carroll yet knew that no man of Warren’s maturity had unleashed his affections on a girl who yet lacked several years of womanhood.  The dead man had been too much of an epicure in femininity for such as that.

But Carroll knew that in that house there was another woman:  Naomi Lawrence—­Evelyn’s sister.  And while Evelyn had dismissed the sister with a few words, Carroll remembered that the girl had described her as being “not so bad looking” and had also said that Mrs. Lawrence fancied that when Warren called at the house, he was calling on her.