The newspapers had been full of the Jennie Brice disappearance.  For disappearance it proved to be.  So far as could be learned, she had not left the city that night, or since, and as she was a striking-looking woman, very blond, as I have said, with a full voice and a languid manner, she could hardly have taken refuge anywhere without being discovered.  The morning after her disappearance a young woman, tall like Jennie Brice and fair, had been seen in the Union Station.  But as she was accompanied by a young man, who bought her magazines and papers, and bade her an excited farewell, sending his love to various members of a family, and promising to feed the canary, this was not seriously considered.  A sort of general alarm went over the country.  When she was younger she had been pretty well known at the Broadway theaters in New York.  One way or another, the Liberty Theater got a lot of free advertising from the case, and I believe Miss Hope’s salary was raised.

The police communicated with Jennie Brice’s people—­she had a sister in Olean, New York, but she had not heard from her.  The sister wrote—­I heard later—­that Jennie had been unhappy with Philip Ladley, and afraid he would kill her.  And Miss Hope told the same story.  But—­there was no corpus, as the lawyers say, and finally the police had to free Mr. Ladley.

Beyond making an attempt to get bail, and failing, he had done nothing.  Asked about his wife, he merely shrugged his shoulders and said she had left him, and would turn up all right.  He was unconcerned:  smoked cigarettes all day, ate and slept well, and looked better since he had had nothing to drink.  And two or three days after the arrest, he sent for the manuscript of his play.

Mr. Howell came for it on the Thursday of that week.

I was on my knees scrubbing the parlor floor, when he rang the bell.  I let him in, and it seemed to me that he looked tired and pale.

“Well, Mrs. Pitman,” he said, smiling, “what did you find in the cellar when the water went down?”

“I’m glad to say that I didn’t find what I feared, Mr. Howell.”

“Not even the onyx clock?”

“Not even the clock,” I replied.  “And I feel as if I’d lost a friend.  A clock is a lot of company.”

“Do you know what I think?” he said, looking at me closely.  “I think you put that clock away yourself, in the excitement, and have forgotten all about it.”

“Nonsense.”

“Think hard.”  He was very much in earnest.  “You knew the water was rising and the Ladleys would have to be moved up to the second floor front, where the clock stood.  You went in there and looked around to see if the room was ready, and you saw the clock.  And knowing that the Ladleys quarreled now and then, and were apt to throw things—­”

“Nothing but a soap-dish, and that only once.”

“—­you took the clock to the attic and put it, say, in an old trunk.”