“Just fold them in,” I said desperately.  “It isn’t difficult.”  And because I was so transparent a fraud and knew he must find me out then, I said something about butter, and went into the pantry.  That’s the trouble with a lie; somebody asks you to tell one as a favor to somebody else, and the first thing you know, you are having to tell a thousand, and trying to remember the ones you have told so you won’t contradict yourself, and the very person you have tried to help turns on you and reproaches you for being untruthful!  I leaned my elbows despondently on the shelf of the kitchen pantry, with the feet of a guard visible through the high window over my head, and waited for Mr. Harbison to come in and demand that I fold a raw egg, and discover that I didn’t know anything about cooking, and was just as useless as all the others.

He came.  He held the bowl out to me and waved a fork in triumph.

“I have solved it,” he said.  “Or, rather, Flannigan and I have solved it.  The mixture awaits the magic touch of the cook.”

I honestly thought I could do the rest.  It was only to be put in a pan and browned, and then in the oven three minutes.  And I did it properly, but for two things:  I should have greased the pan (but this was the book’s fault; it didn’t say) and I should have lighted the oven.  The latter, however, was Mr. Harbison’s fault as much as mine, and I had wit enough to lay it to absent-mindedness on the part of both of us.

After that, Aunt Selina or no Aunt Selina, we decided to have boiled eggs, and Mr. Harbison knew how to cook them.  He put them in the tea kettle and then went to look at the furnace.  And Officer Timothy Flannigan ground the coffee and gave his opinion of the board of health in no stinted terms.  As for me, I burned my fingers and the toast, and felt myself growing hot and cold, for I was going to be found out as soon as Flannigan grasped the situation.

Then, of course, I did the thing that caused me so much trouble later.  I put down the toaster—­at least the Harbison man said it was a toaster—­and went over and stood in front of the policeman.

“I don’t suppose you will understand—­exactly,” I said, “but—­but if anything occurs to—­to make you think I am not—­that things are not what they seem to be—­I mean, what I say they are—­you will understand that it is a joke, won’t you?  A joke, you know.”

Yes, that was what I said.  I know it sounds like a raving delirium, but when Max came down and squizzled some bacon, as he said, and told Flannigan about the robbery, and how, whether it was a joke or deadly earnest, somebody in the house had taken Anne’s pearls, that wretched policeman winked at me solemnly over Max’s shoulder.  Oh, it was awful!

And, to add to my discomfort, the most unpleasant ideas would obtrude themselves.  What was Mr. Harbison doing on the first floor of the house that night?  Ice water, he had said.  But there had been plenty of water in the studio!  And he had told me it was the furnace.