“The person who stooped wore a long red cloak. Probably you preceded your daughter, Mrs. Watkins.”
The lady thus brought to the point made a quick gesture towards the girl who suddenly stood still, and, with a rising colour in her cheeks, answered, with some show of resolution on her own part:
“You say your name is Gryce and that you have a right to address me thus pointedly on a subject which you evidently regard as serious. That is not exact enough for me. Who are you, sir? What is your business?”
“I think you have guessed it. I am a detective from Headquarters. What I want of you I have already stated. Perhaps this young lady can tell me what you cannot. I shall be pleased if this is so.”
“Caroline”—Then the mother broke down. “Show the gentleman what you picked up from the lobby floor last night.”
The girl laughed again, loudly and with evident bravado, before she threw the cloak back and showed what she had evidently been holding in her hand from the first, a sharp-pointed, gold-handled paper-cutter.
“It was lying there and I picked it up. I don’t see any harm in that.”
“You probably meant none. You couldn’t have known the part it had just played in this tragic drama,” said the old detective looking carefully at the cutter which he had taken in his hand, but not so carefully that he failed to note that the look of distress was not lifted from the mother’s face either by her daughter’s words or manner.
“You have washed this?” he asked.
“No. Why should I wash it? It was clean enough. I was just going down to give it in at the desk. I wasn’t going to carry it away.” And she turned aside to the window and began to hum, as though done with the whole matter.
The old detective rubbed his chin, glanced again at the paper-cutter, then at the girl in the window, and lastly at the mother, who had lifted her head again and was facing him bravely.
“It is very important,” he observed to the latter, “that your daughter should be correct in her statement as to the condition of this article when she picked it up. Are
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