"Not quite all. I don't want to give the other fellows too much rope. They're all tied up in a knot, now, and I want them to stay that way." "The 'other fellows,' I suppose, are your esteemed contemporaries?" "In plain English, my hated rivals. But I don't mind telling you. You treated me square in the Holladay case. The boys told me afterwards how you refused to give me away." "All right; fire ahead," I said, and cut my steak. "Well," he began, "I saw at once, after I'd looked over the field and found out that it was impossible to see either Curtiss or Mrs. Lawrence, that the persons who could probably tell me most about the inside workings of this affair were the servants in the Lawrence house. Evidently there must have been trouble of some sort there; and it probably would not escape the servants' notice. So I went after them." I nodded, but kept my eyes on my plate. Here was luck, indeed! "There are five of them," he went on; "an outside man, who takes care of the grounds and horses; a cook, two house-girls, and a maid. The outside man is the husband of the cook; they and the house-girls stay at the place, and the maid lives with her sister in a cottage just off the grounds." "And could they tell you anything?" I asked. "Neither the man, the cook, nor the house-girls could tell me a thing. They'd all been busy preparing for the wedding, and didn't know anything was wrong until the maid, whose name is Lucy Kingdon, told them Miss Lawrence had disappeared. The house-girls had been passing back and forth all the time, and had caught a glimpse of Miss Lawrence now and then, but had noticed absolutely nothing unusual, had seen no stranger about the place, nor heard any outcry. One of them passed Miss Lawrence in the hall as she was talking with the decorator, and says that she was radiant with happiness. "But the maid?" I asked, anxious to hear what he had got from her. "Ah, she was different. She's been with the family a long time. She seems to be a kind of privileged character--a trusted confidante; though why any one should wish to trust her is beyond me--she's not an attractive woman, rather the reverse." "And what did she tell you?" "She didn't tell me anything," answered Godfrey, with some heat. "She beat about the bush and finally got angry. But I'm sure of one thing, and that is that she knows where Miss Lawrence is. Indeed," he added, "I'm pretty certain that Miss Lawrence passed the night in the Kingdon cottage." "Why?" I asked, with lively interest at this confirmation of my own belief. "I don't know--just a sort of intuition. And then--they wouldn't let me in to see." "Oh--you tried to get in, did you?"