“She’s not here,” she said; “but I would not think much of that, Miss Innes. Rosie is a pretty young girl, and perhaps she has a sweetheart. It will be a good thing if she has. The maids stay much better when they have something like that to hold them here.”
Gertrude had gone back to her room, and while I was drinking my cup of hot tea, Mr. Jamieson came in.
“We might take up the conversation where we left off an hour and a half ago,” he said. “But before we go on, I want to say this: The person who escaped from the laundry was a woman with a foot of moderate size and well arched. She wore nothing but a stocking on her right foot, and, in spite of the unlocked door, she escaped by the window.”
And again I thought of Gertrude’s sprained ankle. Was it the right or the left?
“Miss Innes,” the detective began, “what is your opinion of the figure you saw on the east veranda the night you and your maid were in the house alone?”
“And yet your maid affirms with equal positiveness that it was a man.”
“Nonsense,” I broke in. “Liddy had her eyes shut—she always shuts them when she’s frightened.”
“And you never thought then that the intruder who came later that night might be a woman—the woman, in fact, whom you saw on the veranda?”
“I had reasons for thinking it was a man,” I said remembering the pearl cuff-link.
“Now we are getting down to business. WHAT were your reasons for thinking that?”
“If you have any reason for believing that your midnight guest was Mr. Armstrong, other than his visit here the next night, you ought to tell me, Miss Innes. We can take nothing for granted. If, for instance, the intruder who dropped the bar and scratched the staircase—you see, I know about that—if this visitor was a woman, why should not the same woman have come back the following night, met Mr. Armstrong on the circular staircase, and in alarm shot him?”
“It was a man,” I reiterated. And then, because I could think of no other reason for my statement, I told him about the pearl cuff-link. He was intensely interested.
“Will you give me the link,” he said, when I finished, “or, at least, let me see it? I consider it a most important clue.”
“Well, I’m very sorry,” I said, as calmly as I could, “I—the thing is lost. It—it must have fallen out of a box on my dressing-table.”