“Your grandfather’s all right,” he told the frightened girl, quickly.  “He sent me for you, that’s all.  Just hurry and get your things.”

She was with him again in a moment, and seizing the old man’s arm, hurried him down the steps and toward the street almost at a run.

“You’re not telling me the truth,” she said.  “You’re not telling me the truth!”

“Nothing has happened to Roger,” panted Mr. Arp.  “Nothing to mind, I mean.  Here!  We’re going this way, not that.”  They had come to the gate, and as she turned to the right he pulled her round sharply to the left.  “We’re not going to your house.”

“Where are we going?”

“We’re going to your uncle Jonas’s.”

“Why?” she cried, in supreme astonishment.  “What do you want to take me there for?  Don’t you know that he’s stopped speaking to me?”

“Yes,” said the old man, grimly, with something of the look he wore when delivering a clincher at the “National House,”—­“he’s stopped speaking to everybody.”

V

BEAVER BEACH

The Canaan Daily Tocsin of the following morning “ventured the assertion” upon its front page that “the scene at the Pike Mansion was one of unalloyed festivity, music, and mirth; a fairy bower of airy figures wafting here and there to the throb of waltz-strains; a veritable Temple of Terpsichore, shining forth with a myriad of lights, which, together with the generous profusion of floral decorations and the mingled delights afforded by Minds’s orchestra of Indianapolis and Caterer Jones of Chicago, was in all likelihood never heretofore surpassed in elegance in our city. . . .  Only one incident,” the Tocsin remarked, “marred an otherwise perfect occasion, and out of regard for the culprit’s family connections, which are prominent in our social world, we withhold his name.  Suffice it to say that through the vigilance of Mr. Norbert Flitcroft, grandson of Colonel A. A. Flitcroft, who proved himself a thorough Lecoq (the celebrated French detective), the rascal was seized and recognized.  Mr. Flitcroft, having discovered him in hiding, had a cordon of waiters drawn up around his hiding-place, which was the charmingly decorated side piazza of the Pike Mansion, and sent for Judge Pike, who came upon the intruder by surprise.  He evaded the Judge’s indignant grasp, but received a well-merited blow over the head from a poker which the Judge had concealed about his person while pretending to approach the hiding-place casually.  Attracted to the scene by the cries of Mr. Flitcroft, who, standing behind Judge Pike, accidentally received a blow from the same weapon, all the guests of the evening sprang to view the scene, only to behold the culprit leap through a crevice between the strips of canvas which enclosed the piazza.  He was seized by the colored coachman of the Mansion, Sam Warden, and immediately pounced upon by the cordon of Caterer Jones’s dusky assistants from Chicago, who were in ambush outside.  Unfortunately, after a brief struggle he managed to trip Warden, and, the others stumbling upon the prostrate body of the latter, to make his escape in the darkness.