"I hate politics!" she broke in suddenly. "The very name makes me ill. When I read of women wanting to--to vote and all that, I wonder if they know what it means to have to be polite to dreadful people, people who have even been convicts, and all that. Why, our last butler had been a prize fighter!" She sat upright with her hands on the arms of the chair. "That's another thing, too, Mr. Knox. The day after father went away, Carter left. And he has not come back."
"And he left without giving you any warning?"
"Yes. He served luncheon the day after father went away, and the maids say he went away immediately after. He was not there that evening to serve dinner, but--he came back late that night, and got into the house, using his key to the servants entrance. He slept there, the maids said, but he was gone before the servants were up and we have not seen him since."
"We'll go back to Carter again," I said. "Your father has not been ill, has he? I mean recently."
"I can not think of anything except that he had a tooth pulled." She was quick to resent my smile. "Oh, I know I'm not helping you," she exclaimed, "but I have thought over everything until I can not think any more. I always end where I begin."
"You have not noticed any mental symptoms--any lack of memory?"
"He forgot my birthday, two weeks ago," she said. "It was the first one he had ever forgotten, in nineteen of them."
Nineteen! Nineteen from thirty-five leaves sixteen!
"What I meant was this," I explained. "People sometimes have sudden and unaccountable lapses of memory and at those times they are apt to stray away from home. Has your father been worried lately?"
"He has not been himself at all. He has been irritable, even to me, and terrible to the servants. Only to Carter--he was never ugly to Carter. But I do not think it was a lapse of memory. When I remember how he looked that morning, I believe that he meant then to go away. It shows how he had changed, when he could think of going away without a word, and leaving me there alone."
"None. I came to you--" there she stopped.
"Please tell me how you happened to come to me," I urged. "I think you know that I am both honored and pleased."
"I didn't know where to go," she confessed, "so I took the telephone directory, the classified part under 'Attorneys,' and after I shut my eyes, I put my finger haphazard on the page. It pointed to your name."