"Maybe you
could find a lump of coal in my pockets if you searched me."
He stalked up the stairs then and left us. Dallas and I went up
together, but we did not talk. There seemed to be nothing to say.
Not until I had closed and locked the door of my room did I
venture to look at something that I carried in the palm of my
hand. It was a watch, not running--a gentleman's flat gold watch,
and it had been hanging by its fob to a nail in the bricks beside
the aperture.
In the back of the watch were the initials, T.H.H. and the
picture of a girl, cut from a newspaper.
It was my picture.
Chapter XVI. I FACE FLANNIGAN
Dinner waited that night while everybody went to the coal cellar
and stared at the hole in the wall, and watched while Max took a
tracing of it and of some footprints in the coal dust on the
other side.
I did not go. I went into the library with the guilty watch in
the fold of my gown, and found Mr. Harbison there, staring
through the February gloom at the blank wall of the next house,
and quite unconscious of the reporter with a drawing pad just
below him in the area-way. I went over and closed the shutters
before his very eyes, but even then he did not move.
"Will you be good enough to turn around?" I demanded at last.
"Oh!" he said wheeling. "Are YOU here?"
There wasn't any reply to that, so I took the watch and placed it
on the library table between us.
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