CONRAD NORMAN
Centerbrook that her mother considered it safe for her to hear too often. Her brother, Howard Hartley, was sent to a boys' boarding-school up the Hudson, after the English fashion. Mrs. Furness was secretly giving piano lessons in a girls' school in Plainfield. And Flora was left alone in the empty house every afternoon.
Con could not recall how the meetings in the woodshed were discovered, but he remembered clearly enough that he found the missing board replaced one day, and no one answered his industrious uproar among the kindlings. He was not outwitted. He had loosened that board himself in order to get into the Voss back yard before the Furnesses occupied it, and he had another way of entering; he had clambered out a dormer-window on to the roof and forced an entrance through a corresponding window on the Voss side of the house. And more than that. Miss Voss's soundproof walls did not extend to the top story. There was a door from the Gorman attic into the Voss attic. It was bolted on both sides, but, having entered the Voss attic through the window, Con had withdrawn all the bolts. He had gone down through the house and unlocked the cellar door. And with a picked following of young burglars he had made the vacant house the resort of a gang of imaginary desperadoes of which he was captain.
The day that he found the woodshed repaired he went at once to the attic, took off his shoes and
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