ching the
lights, until at last they vanished from the drawing-room and the
library. Then other lights appeared behind curtained windows on the
second floor. These in their turn were extinguished, and Idle Hour sank
deeper into the shadows as the crescent moon slipped behind the horizon.
"God bless her!" North said aloud.
He knocked the ashes from his pipe, and retraced his steps to the drive.
He had but turned from this into the public road when he heard the
clatter of wheels and the beat of hoofs, and a rapidly driven team swung
around a bend in the road in front of him. He stepped aside to let it
pass, but the driver pulled up abreast of him with a loud command to his
horses.
"Heard the news?" he asked, leaning out over the dash-board of his
buggy.
"What news?" asked North.
"Oh, I guess you haven't heard!" said the stranger. "Well, old man
McBride, the hardware merchant, is dead! Murdered!"
"Murdered!" cried North.
"Yes, sir,--murdered! They found him in his store this evening a little
after six. No one knows who did it. Well, good night, I thought maybe
you'd like to know. Awful, ain't it?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
A GAMBLER AT HOME
It was morning, and Mr. Gilmore sat by his cheerful open fire in that
front room of his, where by night were supposed to flourish those games
of chance which were such an offense to the "better element" in Mount
Hope. Mr. Gilmore was hardly a person of unexceptional taste, though he
had no suspicion of this fact, since he counted that room quite all that
any gentleman's parlor should be.
It was a large room furnished in dark velvet and heavy walnut. The red
velvet curtains at the windows, when drawn at night, permitted no ray of
light to escape; the carpet was a gorgeous Brussels affair, the like of
which both as to cost and enduring splendor was not to be found
elsewhere on any floor in Mount Hope. Seated as he then was, Gilmore
could look, if so disposed, at the reflection of his own dark but not
unhandsome face in a massive