Ransom by Grace Livingston Hill

assembled in a heap in the outer hall. When the three burly officers arrived and stalked past the subdued women, they stood humiliated in a row, the parlormaid and the cook weeping convulsively. Marie, with her shrewd eyes cast down, had a sullen look on her pretty, clever face.
    â€œNow,” said Mr. Kershaw when the officers had searched each room carefully and found only a few questionable things that the women said they had “forgotten,” “I’ll give you three just half an hour to pack your belongings and get out. The officers will remain on guard outside your doors while you are doing it.”
    Mary and Clara began to whine and plead and promise all sorts of things for the future, if he would only let them stay. Not Marie. She knew her work was over in that house, her mistress dead. She had planned a big scoop on a large scale with her confederates, had failed, and now all she wanted was to slip away into the unknown and begin a new life in a new place. She cast withering looks of scorn at the other two, who wept copious tears as they packed, hurrying with trembling fingers and furtive glances at the watching officers. She had only resentment and contempt for them. If it hadn’t been for their careless clumsiness, she might have gotten away with her own story. But those two had to appear all decked out! They had not been careful at all, in spite of her warning after she found the keys were gone and after the eerie ringing of the bell from the apartment of a dead woman. They should have known and been on their guard. There was vengeance in Marie’s eyes as she packed.
    When the half hour was over, the policemen escorted the three crestfallen women out of the house, with orders to see each to her own place wherever that was, in the taxi that had been ordered, and they departed bag and baggage.
    Then the three Kershaws stood in the front hall of their deserted home and looked at each other. They felt closer to each other than they had for the past ten years.

Chapter 4
    I t was the father who first recovered his equilibrium.
    â€œThere remains the butler!” he said with a sad smile, the first breaking of a gloom that had been on his face since his children had come back from school. “We might as well make a clean sweep of it and get rid of him, too, though I’m sure I don’t know what good it will do. Their successors will probably be just as bad, if not worse. I suppose I ought to have had them all arrested.”
    â€œD’ya think Hawkins was mixed up in this mess?” asked Randall, keen for another sensation.
    â€œPerhaps not,” said the father, passing his hand wearily over his eyes. “He wouldn’t likely have cared for fur coats and velvet gowns except as merchandise with a possible profit, but no doubt he has helped himself to some of the stores in the cellar. I guess there was plenty!” He sighed heavily.
    â€œShould I go and put out those lights?” asked Christobel practically, hoping to turn her father’s attention and wishing she knew how to lift some of the burden from his shoulders.
    â€œOh, I’ll do that,” he said. “I had forgotten.”
    â€œWe’ll all go,” said Randall. “Better give a once-over to the rooms again. There might be something hidden away they’ve forgotten.”
    So the young people followed their father up the stairs and back to the servants’ rooms.
    It was after they had been carefully over the closets and bureau drawers again and had put out the light behind them, that Kershaw paused in a new kind of dismay before the heap of his dead wife’s clothes lying in a quivering mass of velvets and chiffons and fur.
    â€œWe oughtn’t to leave these things here I suppose,” he said, looking at them helplessly, with sad distaste. “I don’t know why I made such a fuss about it, after all. I suppose I might as well have let the poor things take them. Nobody