It was Grindley, ludicrously inadequate, who answered, "The pen."
Lady McIntyre ran to the open attaché case and took it out. Grindley, at the dressing table, fingering Greta's toilet set, kept a vacant eye on Lady McIntyre.
"What could be more innocent than a perfectly new pen? Look, Mr. Napier. It's never been used, not even once!" She thrust the pen into Napier's hand.
"Well, _look_ at it. Perfectly clean. If it _matters_," Lady McIntyre said, "that pen has never _touched_ ink. And how can you write with a pen if you don't write with ink?"
"We might--ask the lady," suggested Grindley, who was actually opening and unscrewing Greta's silver toilet things, holding bottles up to the light, smelling at corks and stoppers. He slipped out of its silver shell a small bottle of thick blue glass. He uncorked it and applied it gingerly to his nose.
Lady McIntyre, with the dive of a dragon-fly, was at his side. "You think because that's labelled 'Poison,' there's something suspicious about her having it. It just shows! That bottle is part of the manicure set. Read what it says above the label," she commanded.
"_Pour les ongles_," the obliging young man pronounced with impeccable accent. "Yes." And he took the bottle over to the attaché case.
Lady McIntyre made a motion to arrest, to retrieve. As Napier laid a hand on her arm, trembling, she stood still.
"We must let them go through with it," he said.
She looked at him. With an effort Napier could only partly gage. Lady McIntyre recovered herself. "Go through with it? Of--of course. How else,"--she flicked her ear-rings with her drawing-room air--"how else could we convince them?"
Singleton, with some display of muscle, had dragged out from behind the pendent draperies a square, canvas box.
"Ah, that,"--Lady McIntyre went forward, maintaining valiantly the recovered, drawing-room manner--"_that_ is her hat-box. What they can want with her hat-box!" She tried to smile at Napier.
"Heavy for hats," remarked Singleton, in a tone of subdued pleasure. The box was furnished not only with the usual leather handle on the top, but with one on each side. To the top handle the label was still tied. It bore across the upper end the printed legend,