“Call out of a window, and get one of those infernal reporters to do something useful for once,” Max suggested.  But he was indignantly hushed.  We would have starved first.  Jim was peering into the transmitter and knocking the receiver against his hand, like a watch that had stopped.  But nothing happened.  Flannigan reported a box of breakfast food, two lemons, and a pineapple cheese, a combination that didn’t seem to lend itself to anything.

We went back to the dining room from sheer force of habit and sat around the table and looked at the lemonade Flannigan had made.  Anne would talk about the salad her last cook had concocted, and Max told about a little town in Connecticut where the restaurant keeper smokes a corn-cob pipe while he cooks the most luscious fried clams in America.  And Aunt Selina related that in her family they had a recipe for chicken smothered in cream.  And then we sipped the weak lemonade and nibbled at the cheese.

“To change this gridiron martyrdom,” Dallas said finally, “where’s Harbison?  Still looking for his watch?”

“Watch!” Everybody said it in a different tone.

“Sure,” he responded.  “Says his watch was taken last night from the studio.  Better get him down to take a squint at the telephone.  Likely he can fix it.”

Flannigan was beside me with the cheese.  And at that moment I felt Mr. Harbison’s stolen watch slip out of my girdle, slide greasily across my lap, and clatter to the floor.  Flannigan stooped, but luckily it had gone under the table.  To have had it picked up, to have had to explain how I got it, to see them try to ignore my picture pasted in it—­oh, it was impossible!  I put my foot over it.

“Drop something?” Dallas asked perfunctorily, rising.  Flannigan was still half kneeling.

“A fork,” I said, as easily as I could, and the conversation went on.  But Flannigan knew, and I knew he knew.  He watched my every movement like a hawk after that, standing just behind my chair.  I dropped my useless napkin, to have it whirled up before it reached the floor.  I said to Betty that my shoe buckle was loose, and actually got the watch in my hand, only to let it slip at the critical moment.  Then they all got up and went sadly back to the library, and Flannigan and I faced each other.

Flannigan was not a handsome man at any time, though up to then he had at least looked amiable.  But now as I stood with my hand on the back of my chair, his face grew suddenly menacing.  The silence was absolute.  I was the guiltiest wretch alive, and opposite me the law towered and glowered, and held the yellow remnant of a pineapple cheese!  And in the silence that wretched watch lay and ticked and ticked and ticked.  Then Flannigan creaked over and closed the door into the hall, came back, picked up the watch, and looked at it.

“You’re unlucky, I’m thinkin’,” he said finally.  “You’ve got the nerve all right, but you ain’t cute enough.”