"Is there anything new, gentlemen?" he asked.
"I have read the papers," said the young Pole, "and I am sorry for Mr. Warwick. He was a good-natured man."
"Good-natured!" said the old woman, in a tone of contempt "Ah, yes, good-natured."
"I knew," said Drevenoff, "that he quarreled very often with the doctor toward the last, but I never thought it would come to this."
Here the pan slipped from the old woman's fingers, upset the scouring powder and fell to the floor. Muttering angrily she stooped to pick it up.
"Quarreled!" said Ashton-Kirk. He paused in the doorway and looked at the Pole with interest.
"It was about Miss Stella, I think," said Drevenoff. "To be sure I know very little about it, and----"
"You know nothing about it, Drevenoff," said the Breton woman. "If you knew Simon Morse," she continued, turning upon the secret agent, "you would not wonder that any one had words with him."
"Ah, no, perhaps not," said Ashton-Kirk, carelessly. "I understand that his temper was not of the sweetest." He was about turning away when he asked of Drevenoff: "How are you getting?"
"I'm better to-day than I have been for a week," was the answer. "But it won't be for long. Before I came here I worked in a construction gang for the Virginia and North Carolina Railroad and the worst of the line was through low country. Sickness is thick down that way."
"I hope I shall not disturb Miss Corbin," said Ashton-Kirk to Nanon. She gestured in the negative.
"She is sitting with Simon in the room opposite the one where he died," said the woman. "She has been there for hours. She does not pray and she does not cry. She just sits and stares."
The secret agent and his aide reached the second floor by the rear stairs; as they paused by a window which overlooked the house occupied by Okiu, Fuller said:
"There is something which I have been turning over in my mind for the past hour; it occurred to me as soon as we reached here this morning. Do you recall that first drawing which Warwick showed you? It was the one which looked like this."
With his forefinger the young man drew upon the dust of the window glass the design:
"From the very first," said Fuller, "that thing struck me as being a sort of ground plan, so to speak. As you stood talking with Osborne a while ago, I got looking about. It seemed to me that Okiu's house and this one were very much of a size and that the connecting plots of ground were very long and very narrow. Here," and Fuller indicated one of the squares at the end of his drawing, "might be Okiu's house, and here," pointing to the second square, "might be that of Dr. Morse. The intervening space might be the adjoining lawns."