Page:The Clue of the Twisted Candle (1916).djvu/253

"How did you get out?"

"How did you get out?" she challenged him boldly.

"I got out through the door," he confessed; "it seems a ridiculously commonplace way of leaving but that's the only way I could see."

"And that's how I got out," she answered, with a little smile.

"But it was locked."

She laughed.

"I see now," she said; "I was in the cellar. I heard your key in the lock and bolted down the trap, leaving those awful scissors behind. I thought it was Kara with some of his friends and then the voices died away and I ventured to come up and found you had left the door open. So I—so I ..."

These queer little pauses puzzled T. X. There was something she was not telling him. Something she had yet to reveal.

"So I got away you see," she went on. "I came out into the kitchen; there was nobody there,