I sat up in bed. "The police!--why?--what?"
"Shissh! come quickly and don't make a noise," breathed Miss Brown.
I hurried into a shooting-jacket and slippers and joined the lady on the landing. She carried a candle and was adequately if somewhat grotesquely clad in a dressing-gown and an eider-down quilt secured about her waist by a knotted bath-towel. On her head she wore a large black hat. She put her finger to her lips and led the way downstairs. The hall was empty.
"That's curious," said Miss Brown. "There were eighteen mounted policemen in here just now. I was talking to the Inspector--such a nice young man, an intimate friend of the late Sir CHRISTOPHER WREN, who, he informs me privately, did _not_ kill Cock Robin."
She paused, winked and then suddenly dealt me three hearty smacks--one on the shoulder, one on the arm and one in the small of the back. I removed myself hastily out of range.
"Tarantulas, or Peruvian ant-bears, crawling all over you," Miss Brown explained. "Fortunate I saw them in time, as their suck is fatal in ninety-nine cases out of a million, or so GARIBALDI says in the _Origin of Species_." She sniffed. "Tell me, do you smell blood?"
"I do," she said, "quite close at hand too. Yum-yum, I like warm blood." She looked at me through half-closed eyelids. "I should think you'd bleed very prettily, very prettily."
I removed myself still further out of range, assuring her that in spite of my complexion I was in reality anæmic.
She pointed a finger at me. "I know where those policemen are. They're in the garden digging for the body."
"Why, EINSTEIN'S, of course," said Miss Brown. "Edward murdered him last night for his theory. Didn't you suspect?"
"Oh, yes," she said; "smothered him with a pen-wiper. I saw him do it, but I said nothing for Angela's sake, she's so refined."
She darted from me into the drawing-room. I followed and found her standing before the fireplace waving the candle wildly in one hand, a poker in the other and sniffing loudly.
"We must save Edward," she said; "we must find the body and hide it before they can bring in a writ of _Habeas Corpus_. It is here. I can smell blood. Look under the sofa."
She made a flourish at me with her weapon and I at once dived under the sofa. I am a brave man, but I know better than to withstand people in Miss Brown's state of mind.