She answered not a word, but stood leaning on the desk, and looking strangely after us as we trooped out of the room. Mr Shapter, leading us across the passage, halted in a little dull study which had presumably been the master’s, and faced the detectives with a question--“Well?” Valombroso shrugged his shoulders again; Inspector Jannaway did and said nothing. “Come,” said the lawyer impatiently to the former. “Is the letter in your opinion genuine?” “In-con-test-abilmente, signore.” “Then it is no good our searching here?” “Very like, but we must search nevertheless. He may have gone and come back. I say only this: Show me once my man, and I go for him.” Jannaway uttered a curious sound. If his face had not been so immovable. I should have taken it for a laugh. Mr Shapter glanced at him sharply. “You seem amused, Inspector Jannaway,” he said. “Do I, sir?” answered the detective. “I have to seem a lot of things in the course of my duty.” Shapter flounced his shoulders slightly, and turned away. “The sooner we get to business the sooner we shall satisfy ourselves,” he said. “Come.” We left the room together, but outside, by the lawyer’s advice, separated, and took each his independent direction--as one the living rooms, one the offices and cellars, and a third the attics. Inspector Jannaway decided, on his own initiative, for the grounds and ruined outbuildings. Our search, as might have been expected, yielded us no human quarry--not so much as a scullery-maid. Mrs Dalston, it appeared, existed, for whatever reason, the sole tenant of this remote and dismal homestead. But, if the place was void of any sign or shadow of what we sought, the voices of a hundred unseen demons seemed to people it. They rang in peals of laughter up the stairs; they answered mockingly to one’s tap on hollow panels; they rose in reverberant boomings from the cellars, and echoed away down dark passages to a scampering of tiny feet. When, by-and-by, we reassembled in the hall, Valombroso’s instant utterance spoke, I think, the common feeling: “God of mercy, signore! there is only one way to penetrate the secrets of this house--and that is to pull it down.” He wiped his white face with a ball of handkerchief. Inspector Jannaway’s appeared the only composed countenance amongst us. But even his answered with a momentary pallor to the shock of a sudden screech of laughter uttered hard by. It came, or seemed to come, from the room where we had left Mrs Dalston. Mr Shapter, after a second’s paralysis, turned the handle of the door resolutely, and we all looked in. She was standing still where we had left her. A handkerchief was in her hand. Her bosom was rising and falling in hard pants. “Great God, madam!” said the lawyer. “Was it you made that noise?” She gave no answer--she seemed fighting for breath--but presently she spoke: “You have not found him, then?” “Not yet; but we shall come again; we have not finished.”