Below on the porch, with an outraged caretaker’s letter in her hand bag, Aunt Agatha turned her latchkey resolutely in the lock.

“I just will not have it!” reflected Aunt Agatha defiantly.  “I certainly will not.  And I’d have been here yesterday if Mary hadn’t insisted upon my spending the night with her.  Well do I remember how Carl installed himself here last year with a Japanese servant and invited that good-looking Wherry boy to come and scratch the furniture.  I don’t suppose Carl invited him for that purpose,” added Aunt Agatha fairly, “but he did it, anyway.  I can’t for the life of me see why it is that young Mr. Wherry is perpetually making scratches where his feet rest.  And I’m sure he left his footprint on the piano and thundered through every roll on the player, for they’re all out of place, and the Williston caretaker heard him, though like as not it was Carl for that matter.  He’s a Westfall, and he’d do it if he felt like it, dear knows!  Though I must say Carl detests bangy music.”

Still rambling, Aunt Agatha, having fussed considerably over the extraction of the key, halted in the hallway, appalled by the utter loneliness of the darkened rooms.  Beyond in the library a clock boomed loudly through the quiet.  Somewhere upstairs a dull, choking rasp broke the soundless gloom.  Aunt Agatha began to flutter nervously up the stairway.

“It’s Carl of course!” she murmured in a panic.  “I just know it is.  I’ve never known him to even gurgle—­much less snore in his sleep.  Like as not his windows are still boarded up and he’s suffocating.  Only a Westfall would think of such a thing.”

Puffing, Aunt Agatha halted at her nephew’s door.  That and the one adjoining were locked.  There was a den beyond.  Making her way to a door of which Hunch was ignorant.  Aunt Agatha opened it and gasped.  Fully clothed, a man whose feet and hands were securely bound, lay muttering upon the bed, his jargon incomprehensibly foreign.

“God deliver us from all Westfalls!” wept Aunt Agatha.  “Carl’s kidnapped an immigrant!”

With unwavering determination in her round, aggrieved eyes, she swept majestically to the bed and shook the sleeper severely.

“My good man,” she demanded, “what do you mean by lying here on a lace spread with your feet tied and your head scarred?”

Jokai of Vienna stirred and moaned.  Aunt Agatha fumbled for her smelling salts and administered a most heroic draft.  Sputtering, Jokai awoke from his restless stupor and stared.

From the room adjoining came again the dull, choking rasp of Hunch’s heavy slumber.  Fluttering hurriedly to the doorway, Aunt Agatha stared in horror at the littered room and Hunch, the latter no reassuring sight at his best, and thence with fascinated gaze at Jokai of Vienna.  With wild imploring eyes Jokai glanced at his hands and feet.  Miraculously Aunt Agatha understood.  After an interval of petrified indecision, during which she trembled violently and made inarticulate noises in her throat, she fluttered excitedly from the room and returned with a pair of scissors.  Urged to noiseless activity by Jokai’s fear of the sleeper in the farther room, she cut the ropes which bound him and led him stealthily to the hall below.