Somewhere above, in the silent house, Clarence was sulkily dissembling.
"I suppose," said Brown, quietly coming back to where the girl was
sitting in the golden dusk, "that I might as well find Clarence while we
are waiting for your maid. May I go up and look about?"
And taking her silence as assent, he started upstairs.
He hunted carefully, thoroughly, opening doors, peeping under furniture,
investigating clothespresses, listening at intervals, at intervals
calling with misleading mildness. But, like him who died in malmsey,
Clarence remained perjured and false to all sentiments of decency so
often protested purringly to his fair young mistress.
Mechanically Brown opened doors of closets, knowing, if he had stopped to
think, that cats don't usually turn knobs and let themselves into tightly
closed places.
In one big closet on the fifth floor, however, as soon as he opened the
door there came a rustle, and he sprang forward to intercept the
perfidious one; but it was only the air stirring the folds of garments
hanging on the wall.
As he turned to step forth again the door gently closed with an ominous
click, shutting him inside. And after five minutes' frantic fussing he
realized that he was imprisoned by a spring lock at the top of a strange
house, inhabited only by a cat and a bewildered young girl, who might, at
any moment now that the telephone was in order, call a cab and flee from
a man who had tried to explain to her that they were irrevocably
predestined for one another.
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