library on the lower floor and telephoned headquarters. The inspector agreed that the case held a mystery which must be solved.
Garth walked to the embrasure of a high colonial window. The early winter night was already thick above the world. The huge room was too dark. There was a morbid feeling about the house. He had noticed that coming in, for the place had offered him one of those contrasts familiar to New York, where some antique street cars still rattle over sonorous subways. The Taylor home was a large, colonial frame farmhouse which had eventually been crowded by the modern and extravagant dwellings of a fashionable up-town district. In spite of its generous furnishings it projected even to this successful and materialistic detective a heavy air of the past, melancholy and disturbing.
Garth sighed. He had made up his mind. The best way to get at the truth was to accept for the present the dead man's message at its face value. He turned on the single light above the desk in the center of the room. He arranged a chair so that the glare would search its occupant. He sat opposite in the shadow and pressed a button. Almost at once he heard dragging footsteps in the hall, then a timid rapping at the door. The door opened slowly. A bent old man in livery shuffled across the threshold. It was the servant who had admitted Garth on his arrival a few minutes earlier. The detective indicated the chair on which the light fell.
