Shortly after luncheon his mother, sister and the servants left in the big car. It was a dark, gray day with low-hanging clouds and a chill wind blowing off the lake. As Forrester stood by the curb watching the car disappear down the street, he found that a light, misty rain was falling. The weather affected him strongly under the circumstances and he returned to the house with a feeling of depression. Forrester seemed to find something sinister about the deserted house. The closing of the front door behind him echoed through the lonely rooms, and the thud of his feet was uncannily loud as he passed down the hall to the library. Forrester laughed, shook himself and hunted up his pipe. "The truth is," he said, aloud, as the tobacco glowed under the match, "my nerves are getting ragged." In spite of the fact that the detectives had assured him that the solution of the mystery was close at hand Forrester could not fully convince himself that the matter was to be settled in so commonplace a way. The discoveries which he had made must surely possess some significance. It did not seem possible that a band of West Side Italians, far away from the oak tree on the North Shore, could be back of the so-called ghostly manifestations of which he had heard so many rumors, and which Green claimed to have actually witnessed. If these apparitions had no connection with the "Friends of the Poor," then what was their purpose? Busily engaged in his amateur detective work, and full of a certain confidence in his own ability, Forrester had half expected to solve, in a few days, a mystery that had baffled experienced detectives for a year. Now, with the final reckoning only one day away, he realized that he had made practically no progress, except, perhaps, to increase the scope of the mystery. Possibly the fact that he felt himself free to come and go in comparative safety until Saturday had blurred his view of the future. Here in the still, deserted house, however, the misgivings that had been dormant beneath his energetic efforts to solve the problem, now came to the surface. The partial doubt which he had felt the previous evening in respect to the detectives’ theories, now reasserted itself with increased force. While his own theories were mere chimerical pictures, based upon a fanciful explanation of the peculiar facts he had unearthed, Forrester nevertheless had a feeling that they possessed more real substance than was apparent at the present time. Again Forrester laughed and tried to shift his thoughts to the seemingly more logical and matter of fact deductions of the detectives.