The Oldest Flame: A Mrs. Meade Mystery

By Elisabeth Grace Foley

Cover design by Historical Editorial

Silhouette artwork by Casey Koester

Photo credits

Victorian wallpaper © milalala| Vectorstock.com

Magnifying glass © mvp | Fotolia.com

Smashwords Edition

This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Copyright © 2014 Elisabeth Grace Foley

Table of Contents

The Oldest Flame

More Mrs. Meade

About the Author

The Oldest Flame

A man would incur any danger for a woman…would

even die for her! But if this were done simply

with the object of winning her, where was that real love of

which sacrifice of self on behalf of another is the truest proof?

~ Anthony Trollope

Mrs. Meade gazed with much pleasure and contentment over the view from the garden bench where she sat. Below the well-kept gardens of the other houses strung out down the slope of the hill, a silvery glimpse of the river in the valley twinkled bright in the afternoon sun, with a lovely vista of wooded hills rising beyond it. Here in the garden, the air of the summer afternoon was soft and peaceful, with bees humming among the flowers and now and then the sweet piercing song of a bird from the trees high overhead.

Mrs. Meade looked around the garden again, her admiration mixed with something like marveling. The latter expression was accompanied by a touch of motherly fondness as she turned to look at her companion, who was leaning against the tree which cast its shade over the bench.

“How you have grown, Mark!” she said. “The last time I saw you, you were just a rambunctious schoolboy. And now look at the fine young college man you’ve grown into.”

Mark Lansbury grinned with just a touch of self-consciousness. He was a dark, good-looking boy of nineteen, tall and athletic, with a pair of arresting, expressive brown eyes. With Mrs. Meade, whom he had always regarded in the light of a favorite aunt, he was always at his ease, and did not find it necessary to observe the dignity that had become rather more important to him since attaining the aforementioned collegiate status.

“Everything seems to have moved very quickly for your family these past few years,” said Mrs. Meade. “Your father’s promotion—this beautiful new house—and then you off to college. I’ve missed seeing all of you, these years you’ve been so busy. I was so very happy when I received your mother’s invitation last month, to find she had remembered me.”

“She could never forget you!” said Mark warmly. “None of us could. Mother was always thinking about you, even when things were busiest. I’ve heard her speak of you a hundred times.”

“Well, as things have turned out, I’m glad she chose this summer to invite me, since the Greys are here. It’s been so good to see them again too.”

Mark did not answer this. He picked at the smooth bark of the tree, looking down at the grass at Mrs. Meade’s feet, the animation of a moment before gone from his face. Mrs. Meade observed him quietly for a moment, and then, in a voice and manner so light and natural it could never have aroused any suspicion of ulterior motives, entered on an entirely new subject.

“How do you like college?” she said. “Your father told me you were doing very well, but you’ve hardly said a word about it since I’ve been here. Was your first year a good one?”

“Oh, yes, it was fine,” said Mark, shying a broken bit of bark at the ground. “But to tell you the truth, I haven’t been thinking much about college lately.”

“There’s something else on your mind, then?” said Mrs. Meade, who had already divined as much.

“Someone else, anyway,” Mark mumbled, looking down again with a little color in his face.

“My dear boy, don’t tell me you’ve tumbled into a love-affair already!”

“Oh, I didn’t tumble,” said Mark, looking over at her with an uneasy smile, as if he already half regretted sharing his secret. “It’s been coming on steadily enough.” He paused. “It’s Rose, of course. Could you even think it was anyone else?”

There was something different in his voice as he spoke these last words, a subtle ring of feeling that made Mrs. Meade look up at him with closer attention. His restless eyes met hers for an instant. Yes, he had grown up a good deal, she thought. Sensitive, earnest, impatient, ardent—all those qualities of youth were there in abundance, but somewhere along the way a door had opened to the capacity for a deeper feeling, one likely to throw all those very qualities into turmoil.

“Rose,” she said thoughtfully. Mark nodded, watching her as if hoping to gain some sort of encouragement from her response.

“I knew you were always good friends when you were children, but I didn’t know you felt that way about her.”

“Well, I do now,” said Mark. “I’m in love with her—miserably in love with her, Mrs. Meade, but she doesn’t care whether I’m alive or dead.”

Mrs. Meade forbid herself to smile. She had long since learned to balance her sense of humor with her expression of sympathy, and Mark Lansbury was intensely in earnest.

“That seems rather unlikely,” she said. “Does Rose know yet how you feel?”

“She knows I’m in love with her. I’ve told her so. But she doesn’t take me seriously. She thinks it’s just an infatuation and I’ll get over it.” He swung round so his back was against the trunk of the tree. “I used to think, at first, that maybe…”

A wistful look came over his face for a few seconds, but then it vanished and his mouth set bitterly. He thrust his hands deep in his pockets. “But she’s never been the same since she met that Steven Emery. She’d believe anything he told her, whether it was the truth or not.”

Mrs. Meade had been introduced to Steven Emery for the first time the evening before, and she understood the complication to Mark’s problem.

“Who is Mr. Emery exactly? I thought at first that he was a friend of your father’s.”

“No. The Greys met him somehow in Denver last winter, and he’s been hanging around them ever since. Mr. Grey introduced him to Dad when Dad was in the city on business. That’s why he got included in the invitation when Mother asked the Greys down here, I think. Dad’s trying to get him to invest in the new railroad project he wants to put through, because Emery’s supposed to have money. But I don’t think he’s biting. He’s too busy entertaining Rose.”

“Is that why he came down here, do you think?” said Mrs. Meade.

Mark gave a disheartened shrug. “I don’t know whether he has any serious intentions, or if he’s just amusing himself. He’s a lot older than her, you know. But I am serious. How can I make Rose see that?”

“Have you tried poetry?” suggested the practical Mrs. Meade.

“I wrote a lot,” said Mark, “and then tore it up. Rose would only laugh at it. But if it was Steven Emery or someone else like him writing her sonnets, she’d think it grand. It’s all a matter of perception—the way she sees me,” he added, as if he felt it necessary to explain for Mrs. Meade’s benefit.

Mrs. Meade did not entirely succeed in hiding her smile this time, since she had spent a good portion of this conversation trying to adjust her own perception of the parties in question. The image that still came most vividly to her mind was one she had seen from her window some years before, of an eight-year-old Rose and eleven-year-old Mark constructing a river and dam in the mud of a ditch below the railway embankment. But that was before prosperity, in the form of railroads, had descended upon both families—and girlhood upon Rose.

“Nothing I can say will make any difference to Rose,” Mark was saying. “My trouble is that there’s nothing I can do. I’ve got no way of showing her what I’m made of.”

“No, there are few dragons to slay in our everyday life,” said Mrs. Meade thoughtfully. “But do you know, I’ve always thought the girls who would take a man on his dragon-slaying merits rather short-sighted. There are plenty of men who can rise to the occasion when something extraordinary happens, but what about the little things—the common things? Those are what will matter most in the rest of their life together.”

“I don’t know,” said Mark. “I’ve always thought the crisis shows the essence of a man’s character—the trial by fire, so to speak. How he answers to that gives you the clue to everything else about him.”

“How do you think you would be in a crisis?” inquired Mrs. Meade, gravely, but with a genial twinkle in her eye.

Mark reddened a little, but he answered, “I’d like to think I’d come out well…but I don’t see how I’ll ever have the opportunity.”

“Don’t give up, Mark,” said Mrs. Meade, putting her hand out to him with a warm, affectionate manner that acted upon him so far as to bring a somewhat forlorn smile to his face. “Rose is young yet—she may not know just what it is she wants. But don’t waste all your time waiting for your grand chance. Just be ‘faithful in that which is least’—and perhaps one day you’ll find your chance is come.”

“Do you really think I could make my own chance…that way?” said Mark, sounding a little doubtful, but with a somewhat vacant look in his eyes, as if he was turning over an idea in his mind.

“Perhaps you could. Who knows?” said Mrs. Meade, smiling again.

“Yes,” said Mark, “who knows.”

* * *

When Mrs. Meade came through the open French window into the sunny lower hall, a woman was just coming down the staircase opposite. She was dressed for the evening, in white with a pale peach-colored sash, a very simply cut dress that suited her tall, spare style of beauty in such a way that Mrs. Meade inadvertently paused to admire the effect. She had been introduced to Eloisa Parrish on the preceding evening and had been similarly struck by her appearance, but had had little or no success in forming an acquaintance with her. Miss Parrish was a handsome young woman of twenty-seven or twenty-eight, with a certain austerity about her finely molded features and an almost haughty lift to her narrow chin. She had remained silent and aloof through most of the evening in the drawing-room, seemingly unmoved by any kind of pleasantry or any topic of conversation.

She paused for half an instant on the lowest stair as her eyes fell on Mrs. Meade, as if she had not expected to encounter anyone here or did not particularly want to. Mrs. Meade, however, did not see this movement, or perhaps chose not to see it.

“Oh, good afternoon, Miss Parrish,” she said pleasantly. “I was just on my way up to dress for dinner. It has been so fine out that I’ve spent most of the day outdoors. Have you seen much of the garden?”

“No,” said Miss Parrish with the barest of polite smiles, a slight curve of the lips that did not mean much. “No, I have hardly been out of my room today.”

“I hope you are not feeling ill?” said Mrs. Meade. Her direct, yet considerate eyes took stock of the younger woman’s face. “You look a little pale, if I may say so.”

A door opened somewhere in the direction of the drawing-room and voices drifted out, and over them rose the sound of a young girl’s happy laugh. Neither woman’s eyes wavered, but an almost contemptuous expression passed across Miss Parrish’s face.

She lifted her chin slightly, though not, Mrs. Meade thought, so much with defiance as with the air of one who would conceal some emotion. “I must have had a headache, I suppose,” said Miss Parrish in a cool, ironical voice. “At least that is what I must say if I’m asked. That is what we all say, isn’t it, to hide a more embarrassing ailment—the desire for solitude.”

Without another word she moved past Mrs. Meade and went out through the French window onto the terrace. Mrs. Meade looked after her with a slightly perplexed expression, but at nearly the same moment she heard footsteps behind her and turned back as Mrs. Lansbury came into the hall.

Mrs. Lansbury had entered in time to see Miss Parrish disappear through the window, and to observe the expression on Mrs. Meade’s face, and there was understanding in the smile which she exchanged with her friend.

“I hope I haven’t done anything to offend her,” said Mrs. Meade.

“Oh, no,” said Mrs. Lansbury. “It isn’t you. That’s just the way she is—now.” She looked out of the window, and then the two women began slowly to ascend the stairs together. “I invited her here in hopes of improving her spirits a bit, but so far it doesn’t seem to have succeeded. She’s just come back from California, you see, after spending some years out there. I hadn’t heard from her in quite a long time until recently. She doesn’t tell me much, but I gather that there was a—an unhappy love-affair of some sort out there, which seems to have left her rather bitter.”

“Dear me, not another one,” murmured Mrs. Meade.

“You know all of our little dramas already, I see,” said Mrs. Lansbury with a smile.

“Little dramas?”

“Well—they seem that way, against the backdrop of a big world. But I know they are terribly big and important to the young people living them.” They paused for a moment on the first-floor landing. “That’s why it’s pleasant to grow older, in a way—you gain the ability to take things a little more levelly. But it is rather distressing not to be able to feel the sympathy for those passionate young ones that you ought, just because you feel that you could handle their troubles more easily if you were in their place.” She smiled affectionately at Mrs. Meade. “But you, I think, have never lost the ability to see things through everyone’s eyes. That’s the thing that is special about you.”

“Oh, dear, no—not special,” said Mrs. Meade. “It’s really only taking an interest in things—or rather, in people. One must have some kind of an interest in life, after all,” she said, quietly, “and I can’t think of one more rewarding.”

“If a little trying, at times,” said Mrs. Lansbury.

“You mustn’t ever think I mind being made a confidant, if that’s what you are suggesting,” said Mrs. Meade.

Mrs. Lansbury laughed. “Very well! You may consider yourself established as the official confidant of our party. I just hope”—and her smile may have been slightly shadowed with unease—“that we won’t have too much need of you.”

* * *

It was curious, thought Mrs. Meade, that the party gathered around the dinner table should be composed of so many individual cases of despondency and failure. Taken in theory, the people collected here ought to have made very good company. But there was something amiss with each which kept them from being their usual selves, and cast a decided damper over the proceedings. There was Miss Parrish wrapped in the silence of her own wrongs, Mark and his unhappy love. And there seemed to be something brewing in the business sector as well. Both Mr. Lansbury and Mr. Grey bore the abstracted look that seemed to indicate they were thinking of something that dinner had called them away from, and that they were looking ahead to the moment when they could take it up again. In the intervals when the main flow of conversation passed them by, they talked in low voices across the corner of the table. And Mrs. Lansbury, as the hostess, could hardly fail to sense the effect these undercurrents were having on the general tenor of the party she had put together. The only two people who seemed entirely happy and at their ease—aside from Mrs. Grey, whom Mrs. Meade mentally counted aside as the light-hearted, unperceptive sort of woman who seldom notices things which lie beneath the surface—were Rose Grey and Steven Emery.

Rose was alive with youth and spirits, glowing like a little rose with happiness at simply being where she was, at the pleasure of entertaining and being entertained, and at the attention that her dinner companion devoted to her. That this meant much to her was evident in the quick, eager little sideways glances she turned up to Steven Emery as he talked, and the shy, pleased smile that quivered on her lips when he gave his attention to something she said. Their conversation ran on easily, often including Mrs. Grey, regardless of the silence or hesitancy of the others at the table.

Rose was a child still, Mrs. Meade thought as she watched her, but she was at the age where young girls wish to be as grown-up as possible and scorn youthful things—hence her attraction to the older, distinguished Steven Emery and her tendency to look down on her old childhood playmate. It was unfortunate, too, that Mark, on the other side of the table, was incapable of concealing just how hard he was taking it. For most of the meal his eyes had been on Rose, the hurt in them plain at every word she exchanged with her companion. Beside Steven Emery, who had the good grace not to notice his hostility, he appeared merely a jealous and somewhat sullen boy.

And yet even Steven Emery seemed to have something on his mind. Occasionally when Rose was talking animatedly to her mother or someone else, Mrs. Meade observed him stealing a look at her that seemed considering, possibly a little doubtful. Was he wondering if he would be able to win her? All the signs certainly looked favorable. He was said to be well-off financially; he seemed an acceptable suitor in every personal respect. Perhaps he was merely attacked with the self-doubt that sometimes overtakes a man in love. He did not look like a man who lost his self-possession often. In his early thirties, yet handsome enough to look younger, well-dressed and with a distinct charm of manner, he certainly had every advantage calculated to make a good impression. Mrs. Meade, fond as she was of Mark Lansbury, had to acknowledge that there was no good reason why Rose should not fall in love with Steven Emery.

“It’s only the time that makes it difficult,” Mr. Lansbury was saying, turning a small silver fork over slowly in his fingers. “If I had an immediate prospect of capital to show him it would be a different matter altogether.”

“I wouldn’t be upset if you fail this once—you’ve had so many successes. Everything you do seems to go right,” Grey added, with a slight laugh that did not quite succeed.

“Well, you may have something there,” said Lansbury. “Perhaps I am too used to having things go my way. Unfortunate for me, if so, but I’m afraid it doesn’t affect my belief in this project.”

“You can’t fault Thornton for doing things in order,” observed Grey.

“No,” said Lansbury dryly, “except when it inconveniences me.”

There was a general laugh at this, a slight lull in the conversation having made these remarks audible to the rest of the table. The two gentlemen looked up, smiling a little, though it was clear they knew there was less humor in the remark than any of the others appreciated. Mrs. Lansbury may have known, for she sent her husband a gently appealing look from the foot of the table which seemed to ask that he leave business topics for another time. He answered with a look of comprehension and a barely perceptible nod.

“Always railroads!” said Rose to Steven Emery in an undertone, with a pretty little look and smile that was also meant to be one of understanding. He had been listening abstractedly to the other men for a moment, a shade of thoughtfulness on his face, and she guessed that the subject did not interest him.

Whatever the case, he returned the smile. “I shouldn’t despise them, if I were you. Among other things, they may be the reason we are all sitting here at this table tonight.”

“What do you mean?” said Rose.

“Well, aren’t they directly responsible for your father’s and Mr. Lansbury’s success? If one wants to be quite literal about it, we can attribute the very roof over our heads and the salad on our plates to the first pickaxe-blows struck on Carver Cut.”

“Oh, of course,” said Rose, smiling. “And I don’t despise them by any means! I was nearly as interested in the construction as Papa was last winter, and I enjoyed it when he took me to see the work at the Cut. But I’m afraid I’ve never been able to take an interest in the part of railroad business that concerns stocks and shares and such, so I should be left in the dust if the talk turned that way.”

“Well,” said Steven Emery, smiling, in a slightly lower voice, “you could be no less lovely listening than speaking.”

It was low enough that Mrs. Meade only caught a part of the words, but Mark and Miss Parrish both heard it. The effect on the former may be imagined, and it did nothing to improve the latter’s humor either. All evening Miss Parrish had been regarding Rose’s merriment with an air of disapproval worthy of an unfeeling spinster aunt. The line of her fine, almost colorless lips expressed something that approached dislike every time she looked across at the younger girl. Every manifestation of light-heartedness on Rose’s part seemed to grate on her, and she did not even make an attempt to hide it.

Rose could not speak for a full moment. The conflicting feelings of delight and shyness glowed on her face like changing lights, and she did something with her napkin on the edge of the table to hide her confusion, looking for the moment even younger than she was. Steven Emery seemed a little amused as well as gratified at the effect of his compliment—and he had the delicacy to wait until Rose’s heartbeat had steadied before he spoke again.

He leaned toward her slightly. “Perhaps this is not the best conversation for a dinner-table either.”

Rose flashed him a quick, daring glance from her bright, long-lashed gray eyes. “Then you will have to think of another place!”

* * *

After dinner the ladies withdrew to the library, a large, pleasant room at the rear of the house that overlooked the garden through several long French windows, which stood partly open to admit the cool evening breeze. Mrs. Lansbury and Mrs. Grey sat down together by common accord, but Miss Parrish took a seat at some distance from them—and Mrs. Meade, after a few seconds’ consideration, crossed the room and sat down in a chair rather near to Miss Parrish than otherwise. She would have been assured of a pleasant time in the company of her friends, but somehow she did not feel it right to leave Miss Parrish alone. Miss Parrish might choose to draw apart, might not wish to be disturbed, but at least she should not have the opportunity to indulge in self-pity over the fact that no one wanted to be near her—a reaction Mrs. Meade judged as likely to follow as any other.

Rose did not sit, but wandered lightly about the room, looking at the titles of the books on the shelves and at the oil painting above the fireplace, and eventually came to stand at one of the windows, a few yards away from where Miss Parrish and Mrs. Meade sat in pensive but not unfriendly silence. Mrs. Meade’s eyes rested on Rose with a touch of the same fondness they had earlier shown towards Mark. She had known Rose as a little child, and now she was seeing her growing up into a woman. She was so unconsciously lovely as she stood there with the tint of the sunset light falling over her, one slender hand resting on the edge of the open window, with her rich deep-gold curls swept up in that new grown-up style that was still curious to see framing the familiar little features of her face. And Mrs. Meade became aware that Miss Parrish was silently watching the girl too, from her chair in the shadow, and wondered why the gulf between those two, separated only by moderate differences in age, character and style of beauty, should in this instance be so very large.

It was while she was thinking this that she saw Rose’s expression change, and her attitude become one of definite consciousness. Mrs. Meade looked out through the window into the garden and saw that Steven Emery had just come into view there, walking slowly with his hands in his pockets. He glanced up toward the window, and smiled as he saw Rose standing there. The smile was an invitation. Rose gave a quick glance over her shoulder toward her mother, then slipped out through the open window and went toward the edge of the terrace.

Mrs. Meade looked over at Miss Parrish, whose face had settled once more into that set look of disapproval. Perhaps her glance asked a question, but at any rate Miss Parrish felt called upon to speak.

“It is difficult for me to understand why a self-centered child should be such an attractive thing to so many people,” she said.

“Rose may be a little flighty,” admitted Mrs. Meade. “But I do believe she has good sense at heart. Most young girls go through a time when they particularly relish what may seem like frivolity to us.”

There was a slight emphasis on the “us” that would have made most women flinch a little under the gentle irony, for a greater difference than the one between the elegant younger woman and mild, middle-aged Mrs. Meade could hardly be found. But Miss Parrish did not seem to notice.

“That is something which experience will cure her of soon enough,” she said, looking out of the window.

She said nothing more, and so they sat silently again for a few moments until the sound of footsteps and voices in the hall betokened the approach of the men.

It was Mark who opened the door and came into the room a few steps in advance of the others, his eyes already going from one person to another in search of the one. It took him only seconds to see that Rose was not there. His eyes fell upon the open window. A look of comprehension and resentment overspread his face, and he turned abruptly away into a corner of the room.

Mr. Lansbury had entered closely followed by Mr. Grey, but their bearing and brisk pace indicated they had come for some specific purpose rather than to join the party. Lansbury went directly over to his wife and took her hand. “My dear, I hope you won’t mind if we abandon you for a day or two,” he said. “I’ve just had a telegram from Thornton in Denver, and I’ve decided I ought to go there and see him about it. George is going to accompany me.”

“It’s nothing serious, I hope?” said Mrs. Lansbury, looking up at him with subtle questioning in her eyes that seemed to ask more than she would say before all the room.

Lansbury shook his head. Mrs. Meade thought he looked rather tired and harried, as though whatever business he had in hand at the moment was weighing on him more than he liked. “No. I just feel I can be more persuasive about this investment business in person than I can by telegraph. There’s no sense in letting him turn me down just because I didn’t make an opportunity to speak to him.”

“I see. How long will you be gone?”

“Not more than a few days, if all goes well. We could possibly be back by the day after tomorrow.”

Mark, in the corner, was leaning against the bookcase with a restive air, casting uneasy glances toward the French window as if he was trying to make up his mind to do something. Mrs. Meade knew it was only a matter of time before he followed Rose. With this thought, she stood up. It would be regrettable for the already uncomfortable evening to end with some sort of scene, which was a distinct possibility if Mark were to go out by himself and join the two in the garden while in this mood. So Mrs. Meade essayed a spiking of guns.

“Will you walk outside with me, Mark?” she said. “I would very much like to go round the garden again, and see it in the evening.”

A bit reluctantly, she thought, but evidently knowing there was no way to refuse without her knowing why, Mark came forward and opened the window the rest of the way for Mrs. Meade to pass through. They went out and down the few shallow steps from the terrace, and Mrs. Meade took Mark’s arm as they turned to walk along the level lawn to the right. It was an unspoken agreement that they should go that way.

It was a beautiful evening. The setting sun cast streams of gold light over the smooth green lawn and lit up the flowers that stood against its rays like translucent jewels. Away to the left, the valley was falling into shadows of muted color with occasional spangles of light on the tops of the trees, and the clouds above it on the western skyline were a white and gold glory almost too bright to look at. Mrs. Meade, knowing full well that nothing she said was of any consequence, talked on gently about the loveliness of the flowers and about the sunset, while Mark, his eyes searching ahead, murmured an occasional indistinct word of agreement without even hearing what it was he was answering.

At last they rounded a clump of shrubs that brought them in sight of the curving stone wall that bounded this end of the garden. The wall was higher than a man’s head, but served only an ornamental purpose, for it joined to nothing on either end. It was overgrown with a tangle of climbing roses that had crept down and overtaken the flowerbeds at its base and thrown flower-hung grapples across into the trees that stood near it, a fairylike tapestry draped on the rough-hewn stone. The sun struck over the wall and made the corner a pool of light, and Rose Grey and Steven Emery were standing here facing one another, a little apart, with Rose the nearest to the wall. As Mrs. Meade and Mark came into view of them Steven Emery spoke, and his voice carried clearly to their ears. “This is the perfect background for you, Rose,” he said. He was leaning back slightly as if to take in to its fullest effect the picture that she made. “It must have been something more than chance that went into giving you your name, because these flowers are your very own.”

Rose at this instant became aware of the observers, and her face flooded with color. She turned with slightly overdone carelessness toward the wall, and touched the petals of a half-blown pink rose with her fingertips as if the flowers, and not her companion, were her primary interest at the moment. “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m just the shadow—these are the real thing. You could never find anything lovelier than—that, for instance.” She pointed to a deep crimson rose, opened to full velvety perfection, which hung just on the edge of the wall above their heads.

She looked over her shoulder at Steven Emery, and smiled a little. “The best ones are always out of reach, aren’t they.”

“Nothing is ever completely out of reach,” said Steven Emery gallantly, and stepping into the flowerbed, he found a foothold on the projecting edge of a stone, reached up to grasp one of the sturdiest vines and pulled himself up to where he could stretch out his hand and pluck the crimson rose. Mrs. Meade, who had released Mark’s arm, came to stand beside Rose as they watched Emery twist the flower from the vine and then descend. He stepped out of the bed, and held the flower out to Rose. It was very simply done, and yet the moment somehow seemed to have a great weight.

“Thank you,” said Rose. She was looking down at the flower, and spoke in a level, somewhat constrained voice—perhaps because she knew that Mark, standing a few feet apart with his hands in his pockets, was watching her, and knew what sort of expression was on his face. “You didn’t have to do that, Mr. Emery.”

“It’s nothing,” said Steven Emery quietly. “Any man would be willing to do—a great deal more for you, Miss Grey, and not call it a hardship.”

And Mrs. Meade, observing the look in his eyes as he spoke, judged from it that whatever else he might be thinking, he was at least serious in his intentions toward Rose.

* * *

Mrs. Meade had not found time to unpack her satchel after her arrival the evening before. On this night, as she was preparing for bed, she gave the bag a speculative look, and then decided it could just as well be left till morning. She sighed as she concluded this. She felt unaccountably tired. The day had contained no real physical exertion, but mental strain can make one more unpleasantly tired than a simple hard day’s work, and the consciousness that things are not right with the people around us thus affects a perceptive mind.

Mrs. Meade was thinking again of others’ problems as she brushed out her thick graying hair before the bureau mirror, in her dressing-gown, by the light of a single candle. Had it been only a dinner-party, she thought, things would have been different—certain tensions might have been diffused at least for the time being by the parting of the people whose presence affected each other. But the Lansburys’ guests were due to stay here in the same house for at least a week. Mrs. Meade sighed again. She thought of the look of frustrated misery Mark had worn all evening. It must be hard to see a rival successfully winning away the object of your affections under your own roof. She only hoped it would not result in further unhappiness before the week was out.

She finished braiding her hair, and blew out the candle. The night was still warm, so her window was open a few inches. Mrs. Meade raised the sash further and pushed back the curtains to admit the breeze, and then went to bed.

She woke suddenly several hours later. The room was darker, but the house was not silent—she was conscious at once of a commotion below. The vibration of a slamming door, running footsteps and a man’s voice shouting. It took her a few seconds to comprehend the words, and then the sense of them came all at once as she recognized the strong smell of smoke: “Fire! fire! Get up—the house is on fire!”

Hastily Mrs. Meade climbed out of bed and reached for her dressing-gown. With one arm into the sleeve she bent over to put on her slippers. As she straightened up, her eyes fell on the open window, with her satchel sitting on a chair just beneath it. It was the work of an instant to seize the bag and throw it through the window, and in another instant she had opened her bedroom door and was outside in the hall, tying the sash of her dressing-gown as she went. The hall was smoky, and an uneven flaring light was coming up from the staircase, accompanied by the muffled sound of women’s shrieks. Mrs. Meade turned the other way. Miss Parrish’s room was just round the corner of the hall from hers, and the door was shut. Mrs. Meade beat on the door and called out, “Miss Parrish! Miss Parrish, wake up!—fire!”

There was no response. Mrs. Meade tried the door, but it was locked. “Miss Parrish!” she called again. She glanced about her. The smoke was growing thicker; it was dangerous to stay even a moment longer. Mrs. Meade turned and hurried back down the hall, coughing, her hand over her mouth. She descended the stairs to the first-floor landing. Over the banister she caught a glimpse of Mrs. Grey and Rose, her long, loose golden plait of hair streaming over her shoulder, hurrying down the next set of stairs to the ground floor.

As she reached the landing, where the smoke was not so bad, Mark Lansbury came running out of the opposite corridor, disheveled and wide-eyed with alarm, and nearly collided with her. “Where’s Rose?” he cried.

Instead of answering Mrs. Meade seized his arm and pointed back up the stairs she had come down. “Miss Parrish is locked in her room and doesn’t answer! You’ll have to try and break in the door—hurry!”

“All right—I’ll—” For an instant Mark seemed to hesitate, cast one distraught glance around and then bolted up the stairs. Mrs. Meade hurried on downward. The lower hall was filled with smoke, and the doorways of the various rooms were blazing. The front door was open, and a cluster of women clad in nightgowns and shawls and dressing-gowns were milling on the lawn just outside—the cook, two maids, Mrs. Grey and her daughter. Mrs. Lansbury was there, white-faced but composed, and at the edge of the agitated group was the tall, reassuring figure of Steven Emery, his resolute voice rising above the clamor and restoring some measure of order. “Nobody’s hurt? Good—is everyone here?”

Mrs. Meade pushed her way through the group with some difficulty until she was near enough to Emery to make herself heard. “Mr. Emery—Mr. Emery, Mark is still inside, and Miss Parrish. She was shut in her room, and I sent him up to help her.”

Emery sent a swift glance through the doorway of the burning house, up the staircase that was now glowing with fierce orange light. There was a crack and then a splintering sound from one of the downstairs rooms, and a tongue of flame flashed through its doorway and retreated. “I’d better help him. Keep them away—” He raised his voice. “All of you—get well away from the house, and stay away! The butler’s gone for help.” He put the women out of his way and ducked through the front door into the house, as another crash sounded from somewhere inside.

All the windows on the ground floor were bright with that terrible orange radiance as the group of women made their way across the lawn, picking their steps over the dew-wet grass in the wavering light the fire threw, and huddled together near the flower border on the far side. Mrs. Grey wilted to the ground sobbing hysterically, and beside her Mrs. Lansbury’s little maid was shivering and crying more quietly, while Rose, strung up to a pitch of fear and excitement, distractedly tried to calm them both. Mrs. Meade, standing with one hand at her throat, was watching the unnatural light grow slowly in the upper windows, her lips moving in silent prayer for those still inside. The minutes seemed to stretch out endlessly, while the fire raged on without opposition. Would the whole house be consumed before anything could be done to stop it?

Then from down the hill came a faint shout, and Mrs. Meade looked back to see several bobbing points of light coming along the dark road, lanterns in the hands of neighbors responding to the butler’s summons for help. Mrs. Lansbury left the group and hurried down the lawn to meet them.

In the same moment the cook and the other maid both uttered a dismayed cry. Mrs. Meade turned—a figure lurched from the smoking front door of the house, a man bent under a heavy burden. There was a rush of flames against the glass of the nearest window, and their bright light fell upon him. Rose screamed. It was Steven Emery, with Mark Lansbury over his shoulder.

Her heart in her throat, Mrs. Meade moved forward stiffly to meet him. When he had got within ten feet of the group on the lawn Emery swayed to a halt, overbalanced and went to one knee, tumbling the unconscious Mark into the grass. He got back to his feet as Mrs. Meade reached them and knelt beside Mark. She felt Rose’s hand clutch tightly at her shoulder from behind.

“He isn’t hurt,” said Emery hoarsely. “The smoke overcame him. He’ll be all right in a moment.”

“But Miss Parrish!” cried Mrs. Meade.

“I’m going back after her.” He turned and ran back toward the house.

Mrs. Meade loosened Mark’s collar, noting, with the ironic clarity with which inconsequent details stand out in moments of chaos, that his shirt had been misbuttoned, and moved his head to an easier position in the grass. Rose, after watching for a few seconds, cast an anguished look at the blazing house and then fled back to her mother, stumbling over the ruffled hem of her dressing-gown as she went. The men whom the butler had brought were at work now, bringing buckets of water from the pump by the stables in through the front door and rushing out with the empty ones in a swirl of smoke.

Out on the lawn, the only sounds beside the crackle of the flames and an occasional distant shout from one of the workers were Mrs. Grey’s and the little maid’s sobs, and Rose gasping and whispering as she knelt by her mother’s side, one arm around her—whether prayers or comfort for her mother or both. Mrs. Meade fanned Mark steadily with the little maid’s nightcap, the only thing handy, her attention divided between him and the upper corner of the house, from which foreboding wreaths of smoke were now ascending, ghostly grey against the black ceiling of the night. Steven Emery had not yet reappeared.

In a few moments Mark’s eyelashes flickered, and he moved one arm slightly. He coughed, turning on one side with the convulsive motion, and then lay still for a moment, blinking dazedly up at the flaming spectacle that towered over them.

His eyes found Mrs. Meade’s face bending solicitously above him, and he made a confused effort at speech. “Where—what did I—”

“You’re all right, dear. You were overcome by the smoke—Mr. Emery had to carry you out.”

“And Rose—and Mother—”

“They’re safe.”

Mark gave a bitter laugh, which turned into a strangled cough. He tipped his head back and shut his eyes. “My grand chance!” he said thickly. “It couldn’t have been planned any better. And all I do is get made a fool of—again.”

A loud crack from somewhere overhead made Mrs. Meade look up. There were shouts from over near the house and several men dashed out from the front door as if pursued—in the brief second her glance went in their direction Mrs. Meade thought she recognized Steven Emery among them. A broad sheet of flame went up from the corner of the roof immediately above Miss Parrish’s room. With a hundred smaller flames flicking out from it in all directions, the section of roof sank slowly inwards in a seething mass of cinders, and then finally went down with a rush as that whole side of the top story collapsed with a fiery crash.

* * *

On the following morning, when the sun’s earliest rays were not yet warm enough to dry the dew from the grass, a buckboard drove up to one of the houses on the slope of the hill and stopped, and a man with a large battered hat and a large grey moustache got down and looked about for somewhere to tie the team.

Mrs. Meade stood looking out of an upstairs window, clad in a black silk dress that did not fit her too well—a hasty loan from the neighbor who had opened her home to a portion of the Lansburys’ guests; a lady whose name Mrs. Meade could not even remember. The black dress made her face, already a little paler than usual, look tired and older as she gazed down toward the mist-shrouded bend in the road beyond which the tragedy had taken place. But when the rattle of the approaching buckboard attracted her attention and she looked down to see the driver descend, she gave an inadvertent little exclamation and left the window to go downstairs and meet him.

Sheriff Andrew Royal was already in the hall when she reached it, his hat in his hand and his coarse grey hair looking a little more unkempt than usual, as if he had gotten out of bed to come. He cleared his throat twice in a businesslike way before speaking.

“I heard you were up here,” he said gruffly, “so I came up to see if there was—anything I could (erhm!) do for you.”

“That’s very kind of you,” said Mrs. Meade. She was more touched than she could very well express without terribly embarrassing the gruff sheriff. She had not expected it of him to come all this way just to see that she was all right.

There was a short pause. “It’s all so dreadful,” said Mrs. Meade. “That poor Miss Parrish—I can’t help feeling there ought to have been something I could have done.”

“That the woman who was killed?” said Royal. Mrs. Meade nodded. Andrew Royal gave a brief, decisive shake of the head. “Whoever’s fault it was, it couldn’t have been yours.”

He inspected the brim of his hat, then cleared his throat grimly again. “You’re sure there isn’t anything I can do?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, there is,” said Mrs. Meade, whose practical side never deserted her for long. “At the first alarm last night I threw my satchel out of the window. If you have a moment, you might go round back of where the house was and see if by any chance it escaped the flames. I felt—it would be rather insensitive to ask anyone connected with the house to do it.”

Royal looked surprised, but acquiesced willingly enough. Perhaps he had not expected such a literal acceptance of his offer, but since his idea of “doing something” to help was very vague indeed, it may have been better for him that he was asked for a favor he could easily perform.

No sooner had he gone out than Mrs. Meade heard another familiar voice speaking in the entryway to the maid who answered the door, and a moment later Mrs. Lansbury came in. She, like Mrs. Meade, was attired in borrowed clothes, and the dark shadows under her eyes betrayed how dreadfully she had been tried over the past twelve hours.

She greeted Mrs. Meade quietly, with a quick clasp of her hand. “How are all of you here?” she asked.

“The others are still in bed,” said Mrs. Meade. “Mrs. Grey’s nerves are quite in pieces, and poor little Rose is just worn out.”

“Then I had better not disturb them,” said Mrs. Lansbury.

“And Mark?”

Mrs. Lansbury drew a slightly unsteady breath, but managed a smile. “He’s fine. He was a little bit shaken up, so I’ve made him stay in bed too.” She added in a lower tone, “I can only thank God it—wasn’t worse.”

She turned abruptly and walked across the room. “And yet how can I feel thankful for anything, or begin to regret anything—with Eloisa dead in this way. I feel I ought not to be able to even think of anything else.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself for that,” said Mrs. Meade firmly.

Mrs. Lansbury shook her head. “It was in my home, it was I who asked her here; it was—” She paused, and bit her lip. “It was my responsibility.”

After a few moments of silence, Mrs. Meade said, “Have you lost—everything?”

“Very nearly everything, yes,” said Mrs. Lansbury with a sigh. “The men moved out a few pieces of furniture from downstairs, but the rest is gone. I caught up my little jewel-case on my way out of my room. But the earrings I wore last evening I’d laid down on my bureau instead of putting them in the case, so they’re gone too—and I feel such a fool for even thinking of them at all.” She drew herself up a bit more resolutely. “The house doesn’t matter so much. We’re insured—rather well insured—so we won’t suffer in the long run. It’s only the family keepsakes and valuables that can’t be replaced that one regrets.”

She added, “Mr. Emery has been very kind and helpful. He’s gone to telegraph to Denver for me…and he is going to attend to the funeral arrangements.”

Before Mrs. Meade could reply, there was an explosion of sound in the entryway—loud footsteps and voices, and then Andrew Royal strode into the room, a somewhat singed carpetbag in his hand and his moustache bristling.

“If I had any patience,” he said, “I wouldn’t spend it on a stiff-backed, mule-headed windbag like this one! Where’s his right, I’d like to know!”

“Why, Andrew! Is something the matter?” said Mrs. Meade.

Royal huffed with immense scorn. “I’ll say there is. I went round to look for your bag like you asked, and I found it, stuck in a bush outside of the ashes. Just as I was pulling it out, a fellow pops up from nowhere and asks me what I think I’m doing. I tell him it’s none of his business” (Mrs. Meade could picture this exchange quite vividly) “but I’m taking the bag to the lady it belongs to. This fellow doesn’t believe me and says he won’t let me off with it till he does. And he announces his intentions to stick to me like Missouri mud until it gets proved to him that it does belong to a lady, and that the lady exists at all!” Royal came to a stop, hot, red, and out of breath.

“But who was he?” said Mrs. Lansbury. “This sounds extraordinary. What was he doing around our house—and why should he be so concerned about the bag?”

“He’s out there,” said Sheriff Royal, jerking a thumb over his shoulder toward the entry. “Had to bring him up here—only way I could shake him off, short of arresting him. Here, you—get in here!”

He stomped back through the door and prodded into the ladies’ presence, much to their astonishment, the dignified butler who had waited upon the Lansburys’ table at dinner the evening before.

The butler was a broad-shouldered, heavily-built man of no great height, with short-cropped hair thinning on the top of his head. At the moment he was a shade less dignified than usual, bearing a suspicious spark in his eye and the general air of simmering wrath that most people exhibited following a dispute with Andrew Royal.

“Why, Chalmers!” said Mrs. Lansbury, too surprised to think of anything else to say.

“Yes, ma’am,” said (or rather retorted) Chalmers.

Sheriff Royal pointed at Mrs. Meade. “You see this lady?”

Chalmers nodded.

“You recognize her?”

Another short nod. “A guest at the Lansburys’.”

“This is Mrs. Lansbury,” Mrs. Meade interposed for Royal’s benefit, with an indicative gesture.

The sheriff nodded. “Right. And this is the lady that belongs to this bag. D’you recognize the bag, Mrs. Meade?”

“Yes, that is mine.”

“It’s yours?” said Chalmers rather suspiciously.

“Certainly.”

“Satisfied?” demanded Royal.

Chalmers looked slightly disgruntled, but indicated that he was.

He turned and addressed Mrs. Lansbury. “I beg pardon for causing a commotion, ma’am. But when I see a strange gentleman removing a bag from your premises in a suspicious manner, I’m naturally bound to see that there’s nothing wrong about it, aren’t I?”

“Yes—quite naturally, Chalmers,” said Mrs. Lansbury rather faintly. “You may go now.”

Chalmers bowed with all his accustomed dignity and withdrew, without a glance for Sheriff Royal (who had nearly had an apoplectic fit at the words “a suspicious manner”).

When the front door had closed, betokening that the butler was definitely out of earshot, the sheriff exploded. “Natural my foot! I’ll be keeping my eye on that fellow, I can tell you that!” He appeared to recollect the presence of the carpetbag in his hand for the first time, and thumped it down on the seat of a nearby chair. “If you ask me, he’s the most likely one to suspect.”

“Suspect! Suspect him of what?” said Mrs. Meade.

“Good Lord, what do you suppose I’m here for?” said Andrew Royal crossly.

Mrs. Meade heard a quick intake of breath before Mrs. Lansbury spoke. “Do you mean that there is something—”

Royal, who abhorred anything like a “scene,” interrupted her brusquely, determined to diffuse any vestige of suspense or drama that might lead to such. “A couple of the men who helped fight that fire saw some things that struck them as funny. They talked it over and decided to call me in to take a look at it.”

A chill ran through Mrs. Meade. “They think the fire was deliberately set?”

Royal spoke brusquely. “When there’s bonfires built up in the corners of a room made out of the books off the shelves and the cushions off the sofas, it doesn’t exactly look like an accident.”

* * *

Sheriff Andrew Royal never wasted any time in getting down to business once fairly launched on an investigation. He attacked any possible witnesses with a promptitude and efficiency that frequently left them gasping as if a tornado had hit them. In consequence of this, shortly after noon Mrs. Meade received a frantic summons upstairs to the bedroom from which Mrs. Grey had not yet emerged, and guessed quite accurately the reason why.

Mrs. Grey was in bed still, half propped up against the pillows, with nervous eyes and anxiously drawn forehead and hands that could not keep still upon the coverlet. When she saw Mrs. Meade she stretched out a hand to her in a distressed way, and Mrs. Meade took it reassuringly in both of her own as she sat down on the edge of the bed. Rose, who had brought Mrs. Meade the message from her mother, closed the bedroom door and came to stand by the foot with her arm linked around the bedpost.

“Letitia, what on earth is going on?” implored Mrs. Grey. “There was a sheriff up here a little while ago, and he was asking us all sorts of questions about the fire—where we were when it started, and who we saw, and—everything. What does he mean by it?”

“It isn’t anything to do with you, really,” said Mrs. Meade; “he is only questioning anyone who happened to be in the house.”

“But why? What is it all about?”

Mrs. Meade hesitated just a little, choosing her words carefully in her desire to be truthful without distressing Mrs. Grey any further. Evasion was worth nothing, but she wished to make the affair sound as insignificant as possible. “He is only trying to discover just how the fire started. Some of the men who helped to fight it were puzzled by the way things looked downstairs, so the sheriff wants to clear the matter up directly.”

She was looking at the other woman’s face as she spoke, and saw that Mrs. Grey, in spite of her nerves, could still understand what this meant. A look of amazement momentarily overcame the fearfulness in her eyes. “Do you mean—they think the fire was not an accident?”

“From what I understand, yes.”

“But—why would anyone want to start a fire?” said Rose.

“I don’t know, dear. Let us just hope the sheriff will be able to find that out soon. At any rate, I don’t think he will be troubling you again.” Mrs. Meade gave her friend’s hand another comforting pat before she released it and stood up. “If there is anything else you need, be sure to call me. I won’t be far away.”

“Yes—yes, of course,” said Mrs. Grey, who seemed to be thinking of something else, her troubled eyes wandering about the room. “I will. Thank you very much, Letitia.” She looked back up at Mrs. Meade and managed a tired smile.

Rose accompanied Mrs. Meade to the door and opened it for her. Mrs. Meade paused in the doorway, and looked back toward the bed.

“She’s very upset.”

“Yes,” said Rose.

Mrs. Meade looked at her. Rose’s answer had been simple agreement. The very slight inflection of questioning in Mrs. Meade’s remark must have passed her unnoticed. Or perhaps it was a natural circumstance for Mrs. Grey to be very upset.

Mrs. Meade added in the same low tone, laying a hand on Rose’s arm, “Don’t you forget either, dear. I’ll be on hand if you need me for anything.”

Rose nodded, with a little bit of a smile, and closed the door.

Mrs. Meade went downstairs to the empty drawing-room and sat down. She thought back again over the events of the previous day and night. And the one thing that kept returning to her mind was the memory of Mark Lansbury’s voice saying, “The essence of a man’s character—the trial by fire, so to speak.”

She sat still, while the breeze stirred the curtains and light gray clouds dimmed the afternoon outside. The drawing-room was shadowy by the time she heard a ring at the doorbell, and a moment later familiar clumping footsteps in the hall.

Royal came into the room in a way that indicated he had expected to find her here, for he made no initial remark or greeting as he looked at her. He scratched the back of his neck, and then sat down heavily in a chair opposite her.

“Well,” he said, “I’ve got something. It’s just a hint, but it’s something. Might surprise you. And I don’t think you’ll like it any too well.”

Mrs. Meade said quietly, “Is it something to do with Mark Lansbury?”

Royal’s jaw actually dropped—he stared at her for a few seconds and blinked. Then he pulled himself together.

“You’re right, as usual. Though I don’t see how you can know it, unless you’ve already talked to the girl yourself?”

“Which girl?” said Mrs. Meade a little bit quickly.

“The maid. Mrs. Lansbury’s maid. Seems she overheard him say something funny last night that put her mind onto it.”

“When she—oh, yes. That would be it.” Mrs. Meade nodded, reflectively. “‘It couldn’t have been planned any better’—that was it, wasn’t it?”

“That’s it. You were there too, weren’t you? Now, what I want to know is why. The maid gave me a long rigamarole about a romance and a rival and a rose and I don’t know what all, and I’m blamed if I can make head or tail of it.”

“That’s very nearly it,” said Mrs. Meade; and, tailoring her narrative style to her audience, she gave him, with as little sentiment as possible, a description of the state of affairs between Mark Lansbury, Rose Grey and Steven Emery.

Royal listened, and grunted without much interest when she finished. “All nice for a novel,” he said. “But I don’t see what it’s got to do with the fire. Still what the kid said sure makes it look like he had something to do with it.”

“You’d think appearances were even blacker against him, I’m afraid, if you had heard what he was saying to me yesterday afternoon,” said Mrs. Meade, “about how a man is only given a chance to prove himself in a ‘trial by fire’.”

Andrew Royal nearly jumped out of his chair. “What!”

He listened much more intently as Mrs. Meade explained the whole of the conversation she had had with Mark in the garden. “So you think,” he said, “that he started the house on fire, so he could rescue the girl or somebody, and make himself out to be a hero?”

“I should hate to think that!” said Mrs. Meade with surprising energy. “It’s only that I made up my mind to be frank with you from the first, Andrew, whatever my own opinions may be. I know it certainly wouldn’t do Mark any good if you were to hear of such a thing later on.”

The sheriff leaned forward in his chair, examining her keenly from under his bushy eyebrows. “Tell the truth, Lettie. You think the boy did it.”

“I don’t know, Andrew,” said Mrs. Meade, looking down at her folded hands in her lap and shaking her head. “I’ve known Mark since he was a little boy, and I would not have thought him the kind to risk harming other people by doing something that could go so horribly, dangerously wrong. But he was terribly in love, and very wrought up over it, and he could have reached the point where he was ready to do something reckless.”

Royal grunted again. “He’d have had to be pretty far gone. What kind of idiot sets his own house on fire?”

“Well, it’s rather less audacious then setting someone else’s house on fire,” said Mrs. Meade. “If it comes to that, Mrs. Lansbury says the house was well insured. Mark likely would have known about that.”

Andrew Royal plucked at his moustache for a moment. “Insured, eh?” he said. “Where’s Lansbury Senior, now? His wife said he was suddenly called away on business yesterday.”

“In Denver. But I don’t believe he was called away; he told us all he’d decided to go himself.”

“On the board of a railroad company, isn’t he?” said Royal. “What’s he up to just now?”

“I understand he’s been planning the construction of a short new line to connect two busy existing ones—a rather bold project, I believe, since it will have to cross some mountains to do so.”

“Mmm-hmm,” said Royal. “I was talking to that Steven Emery fellow, too. He said Lansbury’s having a job trying to raise the capital for it.”

“Did Mr. Emery tell you why he had chosen not to invest in it?” inquired Mrs. Meade rather pointedly.

One corner of the sheriff’s moustache bent upwards. “I think Emery’s a fellow who likes to put his investments in a basket he can be sure won’t come back full of broken eggs.”

“Mr. Lansbury is no charlatan,” said Mrs. Meade, raising her eyebrows just a trifle.

“I’ll wager he’s no Rockefeller either. Could be he won’t be too put out by his well-insured house’s burning down just when cash on hand will come in handy.”

“But he was not desperate,” exclaimed Mrs. Meade. “The Lansburys may not be extremely rich, but they’ve been quite prosperous for—”

“For an awful short time. I’m not saying anything against your friend, now, but I say when money comes quick, you look around and see where it came from.

“Of course.”

Sheriff Royal seemed more nettled by her unexpected acquiescence. “For all we know, all this could be built on borrowed money,” he grumbled. “Three years ago Lansbury was just a station master, and now look—big new house, trips to Denver, son in college and wife wearing diamonds. And a butler. A butler!” repeated Royal with energy. “If you ask me he’s the fishiest plank in the platform.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Mrs. Meade, a trifle bewildered by the sudden change of attack.

“It wasn’t natural the way he dug in his heels over that bag,” insisted Royal. “Maybe he’d pitched something out a window himself—stealing, and started a fire to hide it.”

“Burning down a whole house is taking a great deal of trouble to hide a theft,” said Mrs. Meade, “besides leaving himself with nothing else to steal.” She considered for a moment. “Who gave the alarm when the fire started?”

Andrew Royal’s face assumed a studious expression that was meant to be crafty. “What did you hear first?”

“I woke to a commotion and a voice somewhere in the house shouting ‘Fire,’ but I can’t say anything about it other than that it was a man’s voice.”

“Well, there were only three men in the house—Emery, the butler and the kid. Want to know what they had to say about it?”

Mrs. Meade acknowledged her interest in the matter.

“The kid says he didn’t wake up until a lot of other folks were already up and making noise. So whether he’s telling the truth or not, he’s no help. Mrs. Lansbury, now, she says that when she came out of her room Emery and the butler were both running around in the halls.” (Mrs. Meade credited the sheriff with this description of the men’s activities.) “Emery says he woke up to the butler shouting ‘fire.’ But this Chalmers fellow says he was woken up by a voice somewhere upstairs, and he can’t even say whether it was a man’s voice or a woman’s.”

“A man’s or a woman’s,” repeated Mrs. Meade thoughtfully.

The sheriff threw up his hands and slumped back in his chair. “If you’re going to look at it that way, there’s only one person can be counted out.”

“Who?”

“The Parrish woman. If she’d started the fire she’d have been the first one out of the house, instead of staying locked in her room.”

“Unless it was suicide.”

“Queer way to commit suicide. I don’t think anybody’d have the nerve to sit and wait for a fire to come up to them.”

Mrs. Meade gave an uncharacteristic shudder, and Andrew Royal at once looked two-thirds grim and one-third guilty. “Sorry, Lettie,” he said. “I—er—forgot you were there. Er—” He cleared his throat several times and fell awkwardly silent.

Mrs. Meade had closed her eyes. She was trying to forget the image in her mind of a hallway weirdly lit in dull orange, the drifts of smoke clouding it, and an unresponsive oak door upon which she had beaten to no avail. If only someone had been able to do something…

Andrew Royal came out of his silence with explosive force. “I still think the butler’s mixed up in it,” he said. Mrs. Meade opened her eyes with a start.

Royal jerked a thumb over his shoulder as if the butler were somewhere outside the nearest window. “You saw the way he acted this morning. I’ll bet he was hanging around there trying to make sure I didn’t happen on any clues to how the fire started. Whether it was Lansbury or the kid who did it, he could’ve been covering for either of ’em. He probably thought the bag was evidence.”

“I would hardly credit him with the feelings of a faithful family retainer, seeing that he has only been with the Lansburys for a year,” said Mrs. Meade, drawing herself up deliberately into something like her former composure, “and before that he was headwaiter in the hotel at Coronet.”

She frowned, hesitated and then spoke again. “But—if it were true—that Mr. Lansbury had arranged the fire—Chalmers could have been his accomplice. Mr. Lansbury was away from home when the fire occurred, and Mr. Grey was with him to provide an alibi. Someone had to perform the actual details of setting the fire—Chalmers seems most likely.”

“And what about the kid?” said Andrew Royal with unaccustomed shrewdness. “I’m not forgetting what the maid said he said. Suppose it was his father and him had the whole thing planned before he talked to you. He could have got to thinking the fire might do him some extra good in getting the girl’s attention, too.”

Mrs. Meade shook her head. “That doesn’t seem quite right. I hardly think—”

“But the butler,” said Royal, reverting to his pet theory without seeming to have heard her. He gestured slowly with a big forefinger, as if enumerating points of argument. “Suppose Lansbury was going to burn his own house—but wanted to save something—and he hid it outside before he left—” He stalled for a moment, still gesturing, but looking as if he had forgotten he was doing it. Mrs. Meade, perhaps for reasons of her own, forbore to interrupt his thoughts.

“—and the butler was in on it, and was supposed to fetch the stuff—and came around in the morning and found me lugging your bag out of the bush!” He sat back, looking rather exhausted, but pleased with himself.

She was not at all sure what she thought of this theory, but she did not altogether object to having the unfortunate butler absorb Royal’s attention. So many things seemed to have gotten disquietingly complicated, and she wanted time to think them through.

Sheriff Royal’s thoughts were moving along very different lines, but at this point they evidently intersected with hers.

He launched himself out of his chair with a quickness belied by his rusty appearance. “Why, blast it!” he sputtered, “if that’s so, then I’ve let that blame butler go right back to get what he was looking for! Blast,” he repeated in disgust. “I knew I should have arrested him this morning.”

* * *

Lansbury and Grey arrived home from Denver the next morning. They found their families established at the hotel in the nearby town of Coronet, where they had moved from their temporary quarters in the neighbors’ homes. Mrs. Meade and Steven Emery were with them, but Sheriff Andrew Royal was not currently in evidence. He had begun the day by serving a search warrant on the indignant Chalmers, who had taken up residence in the staff quarters of the hotel, their hospitality having been extended to him by his friend and successor as headwaiter. Having accomplished nothing here beyond creating a disturbance that eventually made itself felt as far as the manager’s office, Royal collected his young deputy, whom he had summoned from Sour Springs to help, and began digging around the ruins of the Lansbury house, where he was still engaged in searching. With the possible exception of Mrs. Meade, however, no one knew exactly what he was looking for.

Descending the hotel staircase that afternoon, Mrs. Meade met Mark Lansbury on his way up. He looked a little soberer than he had two days before, yet he did not appear as strongly affected by the events of those days as some of the others in the party.

“What’s going on, Mrs. Meade?” he asked her. “Do you know? Mother and Dad don’t seem to be saying what they’re thinking, but I don’t think they like the sheriff’s being here. And Chalmers has asked for his time. He says he’d rather be a waiter and not be persecuted, whatever that means. What’s the sheriff looking for, anyway?”

Instead of answering him, Mrs. Meade came straight to the point that had been troubling her. “Mark, what did you mean the other day by saying it would take a ‘trial by fire’ to prove yourself to Rose?”

Mark looked startled. He stared for just a second, and then a look a look of horrified understanding crept into his wide brown eyes. “Is that what they think?”

Mrs. Meade looked gravely and steadily into his face. “What did you mean?”

A rush of hot color had flooded Mark’s face, up to his forehead. “I don’t know what I meant,” he said. “I just—said it! I never thought—” He leaned against the wall as if for support, his hand gripping nervously at the stair-rail. “Does the sheriff really think that I did it?”

“He—has his suspicions,” said Mrs. Meade as gently as she could. A pitying, yet still puzzled frown rested on her brow as she watched the boy.

“Does Rose know?” he said almost in a whisper.

“No, I think not. I don’t believe Sheriff Royal shared any of his ideas when he questioned her.”

Mark came forward off the wall with sudden anxious urgency. “Please don’t tell her, Mrs. Meade! Keep her from knowing anything if you can help it. I’d—I’d be too ashamed for her to even imagine that about me.”

“Why?” demanded Mrs. Meade unexpectedly. “If Rose is such a romantic girl, she might think it grand, you doing it for her sake.”

“No, no,” said Mark, shaking his head distractedly. “I don’t want her to know. I couldn’t bear it. Can’t you keep it from her? And then if the sheriff finds out something else caused the fire, she’d never even have to know they ever thought that—about me.”

“Very well,” said Mrs. Meade, her kind heart relenting a little before the boy’s distress. “I won’t say anything to her.”

Mark thanked her, stumbling over his words, and then went up the staircase at the rate of three stairs a stride, as if he were afraid someone was after him.

Mrs. Meade went slowly down the stairs and into the lobby, and walked out into the grounds of the hotel. She walked along a smooth, well-kept path until she came to a bench by the side of it, and sat down. How long ago it seemed since she had sat on another bench in the Lansburys’ garden in such happiness and contentment, and watched the sun beginning to lower over the verdant valley. Two days—only two days ago.

She considered what Mark had begged of her just now. In a way, she could understand it. Leaving aside the tragedy that had occurred that night, what had happened to him during the fire was humiliating enough, especially compared to what might have been. Mrs. Meade’s lips twitched with half-reluctant humor as she pictured the opportunity for drama as Mark might have pictured it. To have braved the perils of a burning house to carry a fainting Rose to safety—to be the first one she saw when her eyes opened; to care for her and comfort her—and perhaps to open her eyes to the devotion she had scorned, the devotion of a young man who would go through flames to save her…

Instead, he had arrived late on the scene, had failed to save Miss Parrish, had failed even to find Rose, and in the end he had been the one to be unceremoniously packed out of the burning house over his rival’s shoulder—insult added to injury. Perhaps the sting would be worse if Rose were to think he had planned it himself and still had everything go so awfully awry.

But there was still something wrong with this image…

Mrs. Meade suddenly wondered why Mrs. Lansbury had said “It was my responsibility.” Had she known about some plan of her husband’s that endangered her guests? Or was she blaming herself for having taken her son’s unhappy romance too lightly?

Mrs. Meade did not put much stock in Andrew Royal’s suggestion that Mark had conspired with his father. Mark was far too transparent not to have betrayed some underlying agitation or anticipation connected with the plot beforehand. On the contrary, he had been consumed with Rose and Emery that whole evening, and had barely seemed to notice his father’s existence. No, if Mark was responsible, he had acted alone.

But something just did not fit…

A step on the path roused Mrs. Meade from her meditations. She looked up to see Steven Emery approaching.

“Oh, good afternoon, Mr. Emery,” she said.

“Good afternoon,” said Emery, as he stopped by the bench. He indicated the seat with a gesture. “May I?”

Mrs. Meade acquiesced at once and he sat down. He also looked, she observed, as if he had been thinking over something that puzzled or concerned him. He looked at her for a moment as if he had a question he was weighing whether or not to ask her, and then he spoke.

“Mrs. Meade,” he said, “I heard something this afternoon which frankly astonished me. Is it true that the sheriff suspects Mark Lansbury of having set fire to the house the other night?”

“How did you hear that?” said Mrs. Meade, her thoughts going at once to Rose.

“I went over to the site of the house this afternoon, to see if I might be of some use to the men who are salvaging what they can. Sheriff Royal and his deputy have been over there nearly all day searching for clues. As I was going up the walk, I heard the sheriff speaking in a loud voice somewhere just around the corner of the ruins. From what he said, I gathered—but I could hardly believe it.” He added, “I also heard the sheriff mention your name, as if he had discussed it with you, so I wondered if you might be able to tell me something more.”

“There isn’t much more to tell, I’m afraid—beyond the fact that he is suspected.”

“But on what grounds?”

“On the grounds of something overheard, curiously enough,” said Mrs. Meade, and Steven Emery smiled a little as though accepting a reproof. “It was something one of the maids heard Mark say, in the midst of the confusion that night.”

She seemed to hesitate, and then went on in a lower voice, as if sharing a confidence, “You see, Mr. Emery…Mark is at a rather difficult time, for him. He’s an impetuous boy, and he wants to prove himself at something—anything. Only the other day he was telling me he wished for some opportunity, some ‘trial by fire’ to pass through so he could prove himself by it.”

Emery looked amazed. “He said that?”

“Yes, I’m afraid he did.”

“What an extraordinary coincidence,” said Emery, slowly. “But Mrs. Meade, if he spoke that plainly—of course I wouldn’t presume to dictate to you, but—don’t you think that someone ought to be told?”

“Sheriff Royal knows all that there is to know,” said Mrs. Meade simply.

“It’s really too bad,” said Steven Emery, shaking his head. He looked over at Mrs. Meade with a regretful half-smile. “I would have to be a very blind man indeed not to see that Mark regards me with less than friendly feelings, but I can’t help liking him in spite of it. I suppose all we can hope is that they won’t be too hard on him.”

He stood up, and looked toward the hotel. “I had better be getting back,” he said. “Thank you for telling me all of this.”

“You’re welcome,” said Mrs. Meade. “And Mr. Emery—you won’t…say anything about this just yet, will you?”

Their eyes met as she spoke, and Steven Emery looked as if he understood. “No,” he said. “I won’t speak of it to anyone.”

When he had gone Mrs. Meade sat alone for a little longer. But the lengthening afternoon was growing cooler and she had brought no shawl, so presently she rose and went back to the hotel.

She met Andrew Royal on the last turn of the path. The sheriff had a streak of soot on the end of his nose, and sundry other smudges on his clothes in spite of evident efforts to brush them off. And from the way he eyed her, and waited a moment before speaking, she knew he had something to say which he suspected his listener would not like.

“No luck,” he said at last. “I’ve dug round that heap of ashes and crawled through that garden all day. I’ve questioned that confounded butler until we’re both black in the face, and I’ve even wired to Denver to check up on Lansbury’s business. No leads. Now that Grey fellow, there’s holes in his bank-book you could drop a caboose through, but that’s no help.”

He paused. “It all points to the kid, Lettie. I know how you feel about it. But where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and he’s the only one with any smoke around him.”

“I knew you would come to that conclusion,” said Mrs. Meade, “and I understand why. But I’ve thought it all over very carefully myself, Andrew, and there are three things that do not fit.”

“Such’s what?”

“The books, first of all,” said Mrs. Meade.

Royal looked blank. “What books?”

“You said the fires in the library were started with piles of books and sofa-cushions. Now, Mark has been fond of books his whole life. No one who is really a devoted reader would start a fire with books, if they could find something else handy.

“And then there was his shirt. I loosened his collar when he was unconscious, after Steven Emery brought him out of the house, and I saw that the whole thing was buttoned wrongly—all the buttons were in the wrong buttonholes. That looks like he had dressed hurriedly, at the alarm, rather than having been up before everyone else to start the fire.”

“It wouldn’t go in court,” said Royal, shaking his head.

Mrs. Meade’s voice suddenly grew firmer. “But that’s not all, Andrew. There’s one question I have been asking myself over and over: Why doesn’t Mark show remorse over the death of Miss Parrish? We have been so concerned with the details, I think we’ve been in danger of forgetting at times that a woman died in that fire. And that isn’t like Mark. If he really started that fire, and because of him a woman was killed, he ought to be absolutely sick with guilt. Why isn’t he? He knows how she died. He was outside her door trying to save her when—”

Mrs. Meade suddenly stopped, leaving the sentence unfinished, her eyes fixed on some indefinable point in mid-air. There was a strange expression on her face. Her mouth opened slowly.

“Eh?” said Andrew Royal after a moment, when it was clear she was not going to speak again immediately.

“Yes—I see it all now,” said Mrs. Meade in a hushed voice, without looking at him. “That was why it happened so quickly, when he was there in the hall. And that must mean…” Her voice trailed off. “Now I understand. And it’s worse—even worse than what we imagined, Andrew.”

Royal stared at her. Every sign of belligerence and impatience had left his weathered face, so impressed was he by the strange, serious way in which she spoke.

Mrs. Meade took a step toward him and spoke in a low, hurried voice. “Andrew—will you do just one thing for me? Don’t do anything more until tomorrow. Don’t arrest or question anyone. It will only be a few hours’ difference. There is just one thing I want to find out. But first—” She thought for a minute, and then finished with decision, “First I must speak to Rose.”

* * *

She found Rose sitting alone in the window-seat of her hotel room in the near-twilight, her cheek resting on her hand, gazing pensively out into the softly gathering gloom. Rose turned slowly to look at Mrs. Meade as the older woman sat down opposite her, and Mrs. Meade saw that her gray eyes were dark and almost sad with thought, but in the shadowed corner of the window-seat her face seemed again very young and childish.

“My dear,” Mrs. Meade began quietly, “there is something I would like to tell you. You may not understand it now, or understand why I am saying it, but I do not ask you to understand—only to take it to heart.”

She smiled suddenly. “You are becoming a young woman, Rose, and I know you are looking forward to love. Every girl does. But it is important for you to always ask yourself whether a man’s professed love for you is something that thinks only of itself—of himself. There are many people who can love selfishly, but that kind of love is not always the truest, even though sometimes it can appear splendid on the outside.”

“You sound so serious!” said Rose, wide-eyed, her voice half alarm, half wondering.

“I am serious. But I am also sure that you will find a good man. For now, I only want you to remember—” Mrs. Meade hesitated. “Some young girls might think it romantic, a man committing a desperate act—a crime, even—for the sake of love. They might be flattered to think he had done it for their sake. But at heart it is only selfishness—a sacrifice of righteousness and honor so that he might have the thing he wanted.”

She smiled again, a reassuring, motherly smile, and patted Rose’s hand. “I think you will understand—some time—what I am trying to say. Will you only promise me you will remember it?”

“I’ll try,” said Rose faintly.

Mrs. Meade rose, and bent to kiss her cheek. “Thank you, my dear,” she said. Then she moved quietly across the dim room to the door, went out and closed it behind her.

“And now,” she said to herself, in the hall, “I must speak to the Lansburys.”

* * *

The clock in the hotel lobby was chiming a quarter past twelve when Sheriff Andrew Royal labored up two flights of the broad red-carpeted staircase as if he were scaling a mountain, and looked about at the doors for the number of the room he was seeking. When he found it, he knocked, and in a few seconds the door was opened by Mr. Lansbury, who stepped aside for him to enter.

In spite of the lateness of the hour, there were three other people in the room—Mrs. Lansbury, Mrs. Meade, and George Grey. A lamp was burning on the table by which Mrs. Meade sat, and near it lay a small pile of papers and envelopes. The demeanor of everyone in the room, and the very silence with which they had awaited the coming of the sheriff, made it plain that something had happened, or was about to happen. It was also evident that both of the Lansburys already knew what it was, but Grey had not yet been informed, though from the look on his face as he waited he guessed that it was something serious.

“Thank you for coming up, Sheriff,” said Lansbury, shaking his hand. “I have something here which I think you ought to know about. Mrs. Meade came to me earlier this evening and confided to me a theory she had about the cause of our fire, and asked my help in confirming it—and I think we may have done so.” He glanced down at Mrs. Meade, and spoke to her in a slightly lower voice, tinged with a note of respect. “Would you like to explain it first?”

“It was something you said, in fact, Andrew, that gave me the illumination,” said Mrs. Meade. “You remarked quite off-hand during our conversation earlier that ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire,’ just as I was thinking over something that puzzled me about what happened in the upstairs hall that night. And suddenly it all flashed on me. I remember now that when I stepped out of my room that night there was already a good deal of smoke in the hallway. That did not seem strange to me, of course, because I knew there was a fire in the house. But now I recall clearly that when I turned and went along the hall to Miss Parrish’s room—away from the top of the staircase, which led down to where the fire was—the smoke actually grew thicker. That was why I could not stay long by her door myself. And when I sent Mark up to try and help her, he was nearly suffocated up there in just a few minutes, while I, going down the stairs, found the smoke grew lighter as I went down and it was easier to breathe.

“Do you see what I mean? Where there is smoke, there must be fire. There was another fire burning in Miss Parrish’s room, and it was from there that the smoke was seeping into the hall.”

“You mean she did start it herself?” blurted Royal.

Mrs. Meade shook her head. “You recall my saying to you this afternoon,” she said, “that the solution to this was something even worse than we had imagined. We have been regarding Miss Parrish’s death as a tragic accident caused by someone’s setting a fire for reasons of their own. But it was not. It was murder.”

“Murder!” said Grey and Royal together.

“Yes. Do you know what I think? Miss Parrish was dead before the fire had even started. The fire was set expressly to hide the fact that she had been murdered—to destroy that part of the house so no one would ever know she had met her death in some other way. That also explains why her door was locked, and why she did not answer any attempts to wake her.

“I had guessed so far—but I still could not understand why. It all centered on Miss Parrish—Miss Parrish was the root of the entire mystery. Why Miss Parrish? What had Miss Parrish ever done that someone wished to murder her?

“And do you know what the truth was? She had married Steven Emery in California four years ago.”

Royal stared. So did Grey, for a moment, and then he looked up at Lansbury. “Is that true?” he said.

Lansbury nodded, and walked to the table, where he picked up one of the papers lying there. “Mrs. Meade came to us because she thought my wife might know the names of any people or places with which Miss Parrish had been connected in California. She had guessed at some connection between Emery and Miss Parrish out there, and we were able, by sending some wires, to confirm it. They were married, but he apparently left her about a year afterwards.”

“Miss Parrish was a very proud woman, I think,” said Mrs. Meade gently. “She resumed her maiden name when she came back to Colorado to avoid the humiliation of admitting to her friends here that she had had a husband who left her. It was a strange chance that brought them together here as guests in the same house.

“It explained, too, another thing that had puzzled me before—why Miss Parrish seemed to so dislike your Rose. I had put it down to mere resentment of another girl’s youth and happiness, after the disappointment of the unhappy love affair Miss Parrish was reputed to have had. But really it was simple jealousy.

“I think Steven Emery seriously meant to marry Rose if she would accept him—but he was not free, and most likely knew his wife would never release him to marry another woman, out of her own resentment and jealousy. That was what made me guess at the relationship between them—what other reason would he have for wanting her out of the way? He went to her room that night—whether to make an appeal to her, or whether he had already plotted murder, I don’t know. And he killed her. But he needed to hide the fact—not just the fact of his guilt, but the fact that a murder had been committed at all. For of course no one else in the house had any reason to murder Miss Parrish. He set a fire in her room and locked the door, to ensure that that part of the house would be completely destroyed. Then, to get everyone else out of the house and give his first fire time to burn, he went down and started the fires in the library and drawing-room. Then he roused the household. That was what woke Chalmers. In the confusion Mr. Emery even had an opportunity to make an apparent attempt to save Miss Parrish himself, which no doubt would disarm suspicion, and which he could make sure did not succeed. He had to go upstairs, in fact, to get Mark away from the door somehow before he succeeded in breaking into Miss Parrish’s room, but the smoke in the hall had already done the work for him. So, with bitter irony, he ended up a hero for saving Mark.”

“Emery,” murmured Grey incredulously. He added half to himself, “And we’d have let Rose…”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Meade, giving him a look of understanding. She turned to Lansbury again. “He found out, you know, that suspicion was attached to Mark, and came to me to find out more about it. When I told him about that unlucky ‘trial by fire’ remark of Mark’s, he was amazed—and he said something that ought to have been very telling. He said it was a coincidence. From his point of view, it was! But if Mark really had started the fire it wouldn’t have been a coincidence his saying that; it would have been directly connected. Mr. Emery was quite earnest in recommending that I repeat that remark to the sheriff, by the way, unaware that I had already done so! And if I’m not mistaken, when Sheriff Royal questioned him yesterday he even—hinted a few things”—Mrs. Meade was treading delicately here—“about other people who were in the house, to further cover his own tracks.”

Mrs. Meade’s lips tightened into a decisive line, and her voice became firm as it always did when she felt strongly about something. “It was a very bad, cold-blooded, selfish crime, for he not only committed murder, he endangered all our lives and destroyed his host’s home while he was doing it.”

Andrew Royal seemed to have a throat too dry for speech, but he made a gesture toward the table. Lansbury understood him, and handed over the sheaf of telegrams.

“But can any of this be proved?” said Grey.

“Well,” said Lansbury, “all there really is against him is the fact of the marriage; all Mrs. Meade’s deductions are still deductions only. Even Chalmers’ testimony about the voice he heard upstairs won’t count if he can’t positively identify it. But if Emery believes he’s safe—and if he is confronted abruptly with the whole story, just as Mrs. Meade has told it—he may give himself away.”

Andrew Royal looked up from the papers in his hands, and his thick eyebrows were drawn so low in a threatening scowl that they appeared to meet in the middle. “He’d better,” the sheriff said.

* * *

George Grey shut the door behind him, and stood a moment as if thinking something over. He glanced to his right and left. The hotel was silent at this hour, its corridors dim and empty. Grey moved away toward the staircase. Then a few paces short of it he paused, and turned to his left down another corridor. He stopped at a door and rapped on it, a mere low knocking of knuckles on wood.

The door opened from within. Grey looked at Steven Emery for a moment, and then without invitation moved past him into the room. A single lamp was burning; curls of cigar smoke wreathed upwards above it from where Emery had been sitting by the table with a newspaper.

Steven Emery shut the door, his eyes following the other man as Grey took a short half-turn about the room, but he asked no question. He waited until Grey came to a stop.

Grey faced him, and looked him over again before he finally spoke. “They know everything,” he said. “I’ve just heard it all.”

Emery tilted his head inquiringly. “Who knows—what?” he said. “I don’t understand you.”

“They know that you killed the woman, and that she was your wife.”

There was a pause. No reaction; at least none that Grey had expected. Steven Emery lowered his head slightly, as if giving thought to something. “Well, that alters things somewhat,” he said.

Grey took a sharp step toward him, his frustration boiling up in his voice. “Why in heaven’s name didn’t you tell me?”

“It wasn’t at all necessary,” said Steven Emery. “Our agreement was straightforward: that I should loan you a substantial sum of money to cover certain of your defalcations”—Grey winced palpably—“and in return, you would give your consent to my marriage with your daughter. How I arranged my own affairs in order to meet my side of the agreement was entirely my problem to surmount.”

“And you always intended to—surmount it in this fashion?” Grey’s voice might have held a tinge of accusation, had he not been too conscious of his own doubtful position to dare it.

“I was not about to marry your daughter bigamously. My wife”—he pronounced the word with bitter amusement—“would not have let it pass unchallenged, and there was no question of a divorce.” He bent a faintly amused look upon his companion. “You don’t believe we met at the Lansburys’ by chance, do you? I heard through your wife who Mrs. Lansbury’s other guests were to be, and so exerted my considerable influence with your family and what I knew of the Lansburys to procure an invitation for myself. It merely saved my having to go in search of the lady.” He added, “But I did not see the need to confide any of this in you.”

He scrutinized Grey with a sort of curiosity. “For all your indignation, Grey, why did you come to warn me tonight?”

Grey averted his face with a vague wave of his hand brushing the question away. His voice was sharp. “Of course I would warn you.”

Emery laughed. “Honor among thieves? Is that it?”

“This is no time for joking!” said Grey, coming back to him abruptly. “You have to leave here tonight. If you will turn over any assets you can lay your hands on at short notice to me—you know the other name and address—I’ll send you the funds necessary for you to leave the country. It’s the best way to keep all your property from being confiscated.”

“And you certainly would not want that,” said Steven Emery. “You’ll do nearly anything for that money now, won’t you? First your daughter—and now you’d make it the price of your silence and abet a murder. But I’m never one to refuse.”

“You asked me for my daughter’s hand,” said Grey harshly, “and I laid conditions upon it. I was within my rights to do that, surely.”

“Oh, surely. We understood each other’s lack of scruples thoroughly enough by that time to make it practicable.”

Grey bit his lip, and looked away. Emery, with a slightly contemptuous half-smile, turned away from him and took out a leather valise, which he began packing with a single change of clothes. New valise, and new clothes—like the others, he had lost all he had with him in the Lansbury fire. Sacrificed it all, Grey thought as he watched him. Calculated, unthinking destruction for gain, as Mrs. Meade had said. Well, there was one thing of his own that could be salvaged from the ruins—the good name and security which only Emery’s money could preserve. Even at this price.

Grey said, “You do admit that my silence is valuable to you?”

Emery waited a minute before answering, without turning round. “Yes,” he said.

Grey stood with his hand in his trousers pockets and watched him finish his packing, and nothing more was said until Emery had put on his hat and turned round with the valise in his hand. “Where can I communicate with you?” said Grey.

Steven Emery shook his head. “You won’t,” he said. “I’ll communicate with you when I feel it’s safe—and it will be at that other name and address you mentioned. It’s in both our interest that you not let that become known, incidentally.”

“You don’t trust me,” said Grey, “do you.”

“Only just so far at a time,” said Steven Emery, smiling slightly.

He stepped to the door and grasped the knob, and pulled it open. Grey, looking at the floor again, waited to hear him step out into the hall. But it did not happen. Realization of the silence struck him, and he looked up—past Emery, who stood transfixed in the doorway with his hand still on the knob, to where Sheriff Andrew Royal stood waiting in the hall, grimly silent, his craggy face thrown into grotesque shadow by the brim of his battered hat. Lansbury stood behind him. And Lansbury was looking not at Emery, but past him at his friend; and it was the disbelief in his eyes, more than anything else that was crowded into that moment, that at last made Grey look away.

* * *

“How did you know?” said Lansbury.

“I only guessed,” said Mrs. Meade with a sigh. “It occurred to me, after we had established the connection between Mr. Emery and Miss Parrish…Sheriff Royal, you may as well know, was interested in the amount for which your house was insured against fire—he investigated your financial standing with the thought that perhaps the insurance money could have been useful to you just now. Of course he was wrong—but he did elicit the fact that Mr. Grey was in such difficulties. The burning of your house would not benefit the Greys—but if a wealthy man were to marry their daughter…” Mrs. Meade gave the slightly apologetic half-smile with which she was wont to deprecate her own accomplishments. “I thought perhaps it might be worthwhile to observe where he went this evening.”

* * *

Mrs. Meade did not see Rose Grey again for nearly a month after the fire. At the end of that time Rose and her mother came to Sour Springs for the benefit of Mrs. Grey’s health, her nerves having never quite recovered from the ordeal and what had followed. Rose seemed to have grown a little older in the intervening weeks, quieter and more observant, but her smile was still as quick and as sweet.

It was several days after their arrival before she and Mrs. Meade found themselves alone, sitting under the arbor behind the Colonial Hotel. A very light, soft breeze quivered the leaves of the clematis vines on the arbor, and the first fallen petals were already tumbling on the ground. Rose put out one hand and bent one of the woody tendrils of the vine, curling it around one of the slats of the arbor.

“How are you, my dear?” asked Mrs. Meade, breaking a short silence.

Rose looked over at her and smiled. “I’m all right,” she said.

“You’ve been a very great comfort to your mother, I know,” said Mrs. Meade.

“I didn’t always feel like I could be a comfort to anyone,” said Rose with a sigh. “It’s all been so very strange—I didn’t know where I was or what I was feeling half the time.”

“It must have been very difficult for you.”

“Well—I’m just glad that my father didn’t know anything about the murder until afterward,” said Rose. “It was bad enough finding out about the embezzlement, but that would have been so much worse. I’ve told Mother that, and I think she understands—although she’s still terribly upset about it all.”

There was a moment’s silence. Rose looked down at the toe of her shoe as she smoothed out the short-cropped grass with it meditatively. “Mrs. Meade…could you tell me…do you think it’s at all strange, if I don’t feel—well, quite as upset as I ought to have been?”

“No,” said Mrs. Meade, who understood the different inference in this. “It isn’t a bit strange. I think it only means you didn’t care quite as deeply, at the time, as you thought you did.”

“I certainly never would have believed that then,” said Rose, still staring thoughtfully at the ground.

Mrs. Meade quietly concealed a smile over her embroidery. “No, I think not.”

“He was very—very handsome, and had such nice manners,” said Rose with a little difficulty, as if trying to explain something. “He treated me like a lady—like a grown-up lady, and it was lovely. It was thrilling to talk to him in that way. But when I think about it now, I don’t believe I ever really knew him, as well as I know—anyone else.” She gave the older woman a quick, inquisitive sideways glance. “Do you think I still would have married him if he asked me—just feeling like that?”

“Good heavens, I don’t know,” said Mrs. Meade. “I only thank God you didn’t get the chance to decide!”

“I did remember what you told me, and I understood,” said Rose a little more quietly, “and it helped.”

Again there was silence for a moment. Then she added, with a funny little tremble of laughter in her voice, “When you said all that to me, I thought you were warning me about—Mark!”

“About Mark!” said Mrs. Meade, letting her work drop into her lap as she looked up in astonishment.

“Yes.”

“You knew that he was suspected, then?”

Rose nodded. “That day, at the hotel, I opened my door and Mrs. Lansbury’s maid was whispering in the corridor with Mother’s Nellie. They were saying how Mark must have done it—and I knew why. It made me feel so terrible. I didn’t think Mark could act that way—it wasn’t like him.”

“It may not have stood up in court,” said Mrs. Meade, smiling, “but that was what I told Sheriff Royal all along. As it turns out, you and I were both right about Mark. He would never do anything so thoughtless and dangerous, even if he does sometimes lament the shortage of dragons.”

“Dragons?” said Rose, puzzled.

“I think Mark has yet to discover,” said Mrs. Meade, “that ‘dragons’ are just another name for all the little ordinary difficulties that meet us every day of our lives.”

“Oh,” said Rose, perhaps not too enlightened, but looking thoughtful.

Mrs. Meade did not trouble herself to inquire why Rose had felt so badly over the idea of Mark’s supposed guilt. But she was smiling a little to herself as she picked up her embroidery again.

###

More Mrs. Meade

The Silver Shawl: A Mrs. Meade Mystery

In a small town in turn-of-the-century Colorado, a young woman has disappeared from the boarding-house where she lives. Her distraught fiancé is certain that she must have been kidnapped. But the case takes a new turn when a city detective appears on the scene, looking for a woman who matches the description of the missing girl. Was Charity really kidnapped, or did she have a reason to flee? Mrs. Meade, a gentle but shrewd widow lady who lives across the hall in the boarding-house, feels that there is something wrong with the story of Charity’s disappearance…but can she unravel the mystery before it is too late? The first entry in the Mrs. Meade Mysteries series, approximately 15,700 words long.

Find it at Smashwords: www.smashwords.com/books/view/241238

The Parting Glass: A Mrs. Meade Mystery

Mrs. Meade is not the only one in Sour Springs who is shocked at the news when Clyde Renfrew is accused of drunken assault on a woman. Clyde, a sober, steady young rancher, seemed the last person likely to do such a thing. Between an emphatic witness and Clyde’s own apparent reluctance to defend himself, the case seems open and shut. But Mrs. Meade—who seems to have a knack for being just across the hall when things happen—has a few ideas of her own…

Find it at Smashwords: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/346361

More books by this author:

The Ranch Next Door and Other Stories

War Memorial: A Short Story

Some Christmas Camouflage: A Short Story

About the Author

Elisabeth Grace Foley grew up an avid reader and has always been fascinated with history, so when she turned to writing, historical fiction was naturally her first choice. Her first published story, “Disturbing the Peace,” was an honorable mention in the first annual Rope and Wire Western short story competition, and is now collected with six others that are appearing for the first time in her debut short story collection, The Ranch Next Door and Other Stories. A homeschool graduate, she chose not to attend college in order to pursue self-education and her writing career. She also enjoys music, crocheting and spending time outdoors. She lives at home with her family and a large stack of writer’s notebooks.

Elisabeth’s Blog: www.thesecondsentence.blogspot.com

Twitter: www.twitter.com/ElisabethGFoley

Table of Contents

The Oldest Flame

More Mrs. Meade

About the Author