attitude of hostility. Then she seemed to make up her mind.
"I oughtn't to say another word. I've said too much, already. But you've been liberal with me, sir, and I know somethin' you've a right to be told, which I'm thinkin' no one else is agoin' to tell you. Look at the bottom of his study door a minute, sir."
I followed her direction. What I saw led me to drop to my hands and knees, the better to examine it.
"Why should he put a rubber strip on the bottom of his door?" I asked, getting up.
She replied with another enigmatical suggestion:
"Look at these, if you will, sir. You'll remember that he slept in this study. That was his bed, over there in the alcove."
"Bolts!" I exclaimed. And I reinforced sight with touch by shooting one of them back and forth a few times. "Double bolts on the inside of his bedroom door! An upstairs room, at that. What was the idea?"
Mrs. Malkin portentously shook her head and sighed, as one unburdening her mind.
"Only this can I say, sir: He was afraid of something—terribly afraid, sir. Something that came in the night."
"What was it?" I demanded.
"I don't know, sir."
"It was in the night that—it happened?" I asked.
She nodded; then, as if the prologue were over, as if she had prepared my mind sufficiently, she produced something from under her apron. She must have been holding it there all the time.
"It's his diary, sir. It was lying here on the floor. I saved it for you, before the police could get their hands on it."
I opened the little book. One of the sheets near the back was crumpled, and I glanced at it, idly. What I read there impelled me to slap the covers shut again.
"Did you read this?" I demanded.
She met my gaze, frankly.
"I looked into it, sir, just as you did—only just looked into it. Not for worlds would I do even that again!"
"I noticed some reference here to a slab in the cellar. What slab is that?"
"It covers an old, dried-up well, sir."
"Will you show it to me?"
"You can find it for yourself, sir. if you wish. I'm not goin' down there," she said, decidedly.
"Ah, well, I've seen enough for today," I told her. "I'll take the diary back to my hotel and read it."
I did not return to my hotel, however. In my one brief glance into the little book, I had seen something which had bitten into my soul; only a few words, but they had brought me very near to that queer, solitary man who had been my uncle.
I dismissed Mrs. Malkin, and remained in the study. There was the fitting place to read the diary he had left behind him.
His personality lingered like a vapor in that study. I settled into his deep morris chair, and turned it to catch the light from the single, narrow window—the light, doubtless, by which he had written much of his work on entomology.
That same struggling illumination played shadowy tricks with hosts of wall-crucified insects, which seemed engaged in a united effort to crawl upward in sinuous lines. Some of their number, impaled to the ceiling itself, peered quiveringly down on the aspiring multitude. The whole house, with its crisp dead, rustling in any vagrant breeze, brought back to my mind the hand that had pinned them, one by one, on wall and ceiling and furniture. A kindly hand, I reflected, though eccentric; one not to
