A ridiculous concession, but finally she had her way; the farce was enacted and they left her as she had requested them to do, alone with her dreams in the small room.

Suddenly they heard her cry out, and in another moment she appeared before them, the picture of excitement.

“Is this chair standing exactly as it did when Mr. Spielhagen occupied it?” she asked.

“No,” said Mr. Upjohn, “it faced the other way.”

She stepped back and twirled the chair about with her disengaged hand.

“So?”

Mr. Upjohn and Mr. Spielhagen both nodded, so did the others when she glanced at them.

With a sign of ill-concealed satisfaction, she drew their attention to herself; then eagerly cried: 

“Gentlemen, look here!”

Seating herself, she allowed her whole body to relax till she presented the picture of one calmly asleep.  Then, as they continued to gaze at with fascinated eyes, not knowing what to expect, they saw something white escape from her lap and slide across the floor till it touched and was stayed by the wainscot.  It was the top page of the manuscript she held, and as some inkling of the truth reached their astonished minds, she sprang impetuously to her feet and, pointing to the fallen sheet, cried: 

“Do you understand now?  Look where it lies and then look here!”

She had bounded towards the wall and was now on her knees pointing to the bottom of the wainscot, just a few inches to the left of the fallen page.

“A crack!” she cried, “under what was once the door.  It’s a very thin one, hardly perceptible to the eye.  But see!” Here she laid her finger on the fallen paper and drawing it towards her, pushed it carefully against the lower edge of the wainscot.  Half of it at once disappeared.

“I could easily slip it all through,” she assured them, withdrawing the sheet and leaping to her feet in triumph.  “You know now where the missing page lies, Mr. Spielhagen.  All that remains is for Mr. Van Broecklyn to get it for you.”

IV

The cries of mingled astonishment and relief which greeted this simple elucidation of the mystery were broken by a curiously choked, almost unintelligible, cry.  It came from the man thus appealed to, who, unnoticed by them all, had started at her first word and gradually, as action followed action, withdrawn himself till he now stood alone and in an attitude almost of defiance behind the large table in the centre of the library.

“I am sorry,” he began, with a brusqueness which gradually toned down into a forced urbanity as he beheld every eye fixed upon him in amazement, “that circumstances forbid my being of assistance to you in this unfortunate matter.  If the paper lies where you say, and I see no other explanation of its loss, I am afraid it will have to remain there for this night at least.  The cement in which that door is embedded is thick as any wall; it would take men with pickaxes, possibly with dynamite, to make a breach there wide enough for any one to reach in.  And we are far from any such help.”