“I’ve a notion it may be connected with the strike,” Augusta Maturin continued.  “I never could account for her being mixed up in that, plunging into Syndicalism.  It seemed so foreign to her nature.  I wish I’d waited a little longer before telling her about the strike, but one day she asked me how it had come out—­and she seemed to be getting along so nicely I didn’t see any reason for not telling her.  I said that the strike was over, that the millowners had accepted the I.W.W. terms, but that Antonelli and Jastro had been sent to jail and were awaiting trial because they had been accused of instigating the murder of a woman who was shot by a striker aiming at a policeman.  It seems that she had seen that!  She told me so quite casually.  But she was interested, and I went on to mention how greatly the strikers were stirred by the arrests, how they paraded in front of the jail, singing, and how the feeling was mostly directed against Mr. Ditmar, because he was accused of instigating the placing of dynamite in the tenements.”

“And you spoke of Mr. Ditmar’s death?” Insall inquired.

“Why yes, I told her how he had been shot in Dover Street by a demented Italian, and if it hadn’t been proved that the Italian was insane and not a mill worker, the result of the strike might have been different.”

“How did she take it?”

“Well, she was shocked, of course.  She sat up in bed, staring at me, and then leaned back on the pillows again.  I pretended not to notice it—­but I was sorry I’d said anything about it.”

“She didn’t say anything?”

“Not a word.”

“Didn’t you know that, before the strike, she was Ditmar’s private stenographer?”

“No!” Augusta Maturin exclaimed.  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It never occurred to me to tell you,” Insall replied.

“That must have something to do with it!” said Mrs. Maturin.

Insall got up and walked to the end of the terrace, gazing at a bluebird on the edge of the lawn.

“Well, not necessarily,” he said, after a while.  “Did you ever find out anything about her family?”

“Oh, yes, I met the father once, he’s been out two or three times, on Sunday, and came over here to thank me for what I’d done.  The mother doesn’t come—­she has some trouble, I don’t know exactly what.  Brooks, I wish you could see the father, he’s so typically unique—­if one may use the expression.  A gatekeeper at the Chippering Mills!”

“A gatekeeper?”

“Yes, and I’m quite sure he doesn’t understand to this day how he became one, or why.  He’s delightfully naive on the subject of genealogy, and I had the Bumpus family by heart before he left.  That’s the form his remnant of the intellectual curiosity of his ancestors takes.  He was born in Dolton, which was settled by the original Bumpus, back in the Plymouth Colony days, and if he were rich he’d have a library stuffed with gritty, yellow-backed