Mystery Villa by E.R. Punshon Page A

her wedding and waited, while the guests all came and wondered why he didn’t, and said how cruel it was to treat a girl like that, and then one by one they went – and left her alone; alone with her trunk and – That.’
    â€˜Eh, now, then,’ Wild muttered, ‘if it was like that, what a thing to happen; what a way to live.’
    And they were both silent, trying in a kind of haze of incredulous amazement to realise that something of that nature must have been; to imagine the existence led all through the long and solitary years, for a full half-century, perhaps, by this woman in her lonely room, her sole companion the dreadful occupant of the Saratoga trunk. There she had lived with her appalling secret from the day when the wedding festivities had been made all ready till now when at last had come to light the secret of that murder of long ago.
    â€˜It don’t bear thinking of,’ Wild said, at last. ‘Enough to drive you dotty... no wonder she went like she is. Where is she now, though?’
    â€˜We must make sure she’s nowhere in the house,’ Bobby said; ‘and then, I suppose, we had better get along and report.’
    â€˜Most likely she’s gone off with one of the parties you’ve seen here,’ Wild suggested. ‘Perhaps with the smart-looking girl that was here that other time. Can they have known, any of them? I can’t hardly believe, myself, that poor old thing could ever do such a thing. I saw her once – a little thin faded wisp of a woman you could have blown away as soon as look at.’
    â€˜I daresay she wasn’t always like that,’ Bobby said. ‘I daresay, then, she was – different. It’s forty or fifty years ago, and in forty or fifty years...’
    He left the sentence unfinished, his hot and lusty youth brought, as it were, for the first time face to face with the supreme mystery of time that slips by like a dream and yet bears all substantial things away.
    â€˜That’s right,’ agreed Wild. ‘When you’re young, you’re different; and very likely she was too, same as you say. Can she have known we were coming, and bunked off because of that?’
    â€˜How could she have known, when we didn’t know ourselves?’ Bobby asked. ‘Besides, she had nothing to do but show herself at the window and beckon us to go away. We had no real suspicions; no search warrant; no grounds for breaking in. She was safe enough so long as she stayed here; perhaps that’s why she did stay here.’
    â€˜Well, she’s gone,’ said Wild. ‘What I’m wondering is, how the body’s gone like that, all shrivelled up and mummified, like it is. Can she have done anything to it?’
    â€˜The doctors may be able to tell,’ Bobby remarked.
    All this time he had been holding in his hand the pearl – or bead – they had found. He put it down now, carefully, on the mantelpiece — on a sheet of paper he tore from an old letter he had in his pocket.
    â€˜I am wondering, if that comes in, where it comes in,’ he said; and then he went across to the satin shoe they had noticed lying on the floor, and looked at it closely again, and put it down beside the pearl – or bead. ‘And that – where does that come in?’ he said. ‘For it looks to me as though it had been worn.’
    â€˜Most likely she just kept it out of sentiment, as you might say,’ Wild suggested. ‘I remember my old woman kept a piece of our wedding-cake for years, till our youngest but three found it and ate it, and, after that, the two of us had to stop up with her all night, her being green in the face and yelling so we almost thought she was going to peg out, same as all the neighbours hoped so they could get to sleep again.’
    â€˜It does look as if it were part of the wedding dress,’ Bobby agreed. ‘Only, it looks as if it had been a good deal worn,