I placed my finger on the passage and was about to say something about my suspicions of Kato when we heard the sound of footsteps in the hall, and Craig snapped the book shut, returning it hastily to the bookcase.  It was Miss Langdale who had made her patient comfortable in bed and now returned to us.

“Who is this Kato?” inquired Craig, voicing what was in my own mind.  “What do you know about him?”

“Just a young Japanese from the Mission downtown,” replied the nurse, directly.  “I don’t suppose you know, but Mrs. Wardlaw used to be greatly interested in religious and social work among the Japanese and Chinese; would be yet, but,” she added, significantly, “she is not strong enough.  They employed him before I came here, about a year ago, I think.”

Kennedy nodded, and was about to ask another question, when there was a slight noise out in the hall.  Thinking it might be Kato himself, I sprang to the door.

Instead, I encountered a middle-aged man, who drew back in surprise at seeing me, a stranger.

“Oh, good morning, Doctor Aitken!” greeted Miss Langdale, in quite the casual manner of a nurse accustomed to the daily visit at about this hour.

As for Doctor Aitken, he glanced from Leslie, whom he knew, to Kennedy, whom he did not know, with a very surprised look on his face.  In fact, I got the impression that after he had been admitted he had paused a moment in the hall to listen to the strange voices in the Wardlaw study.

Leslie nodded to him and introduced us, without quite knowing what to say or do, any more than Doctor Aitken.

“A most incomprehensible case,” ventured Aitken to us.  “I can’t, for the life of me, make it out.”  The doctor showed his perplexity plainly, whether it was feigned or not.

“I’m afraid she’s not quite so well as usual,” put in Miss Langdale, speaking to him, but in a manner that indicated that first of all she wished any blame for her patient’s condition to attach to us and not to herself.

Doctor Aitken pursed up his lips, bowed excusingly to us, and turned down the hall, followed by the nurse.  As they passed on to Mrs. Wardlaw’s room, I am sure they whispered about us.  I was puzzled by Doctor Aitken.  He seemed to be sincere, yet, under the circumstances, I felt that I must be suspicious of everybody and everything.

Alone again for a moment, Kennedy turned his attention to the furniture of the room, and finally paused before a writing-desk in the corner.  He tried it.  It was not locked and he opened it.  Quickly he ran through a pile of papers carefully laid under a paper-weight at the back.

A suppressed exclamation from him called my attention to something that he had discovered.  There lay two documents, evidently recently drawn up.  As we looked over the first, we saw that it was Doctor Wardlaw’s will, in which he had left everything to his wife, although he was not an especially wealthy man.  The other was the will of Mrs. Wardlaw.