"Good!" I again cried, in my relief that the discovery made at that meeting had not been shared by him.
"We had sounded Mrs. Boppert ourselves, but she had seemed a very hopeless job, and I do not yet see how you got any water out of that stone—if you did."
"No?" I retorted ambiguously, enjoying the Inspector's manifest delight in this scene as much as I did my own secret thoughts and the prospect of the surprise I was holding in store for them.
"But your interference with the clock and the discovery you made that it had been going at the time the shelves fell, was not unknown to us, and we have made use of it, good use as you will hereafter see."
"So! those girls could not keep a secret after all," I muttered; and waited with some anxiety to hear him mention the pin-cushion; but he did not, greatly to my relief.
"Don't blame the girls!" he put in (his ears evidently are as sharp as mine); "the inquiries having proceeded from Franklin, it was only natural for me to suspect that he was trying to mislead us by some hocus-pocus story. So I visited the girls. That I had difficulty in getting to the root of the matter is to their credit, Miss Butterworth, seeing that you had made them promise secrecy."
"You are right," I nodded, and forgave them on the spot. If I could not withstand Mr. Gryce's eloquence—and it affected me at times—how could I expect these girls to. Besides, they had not revealed the more important secret I had confided to them, and in consideration of this I was ready to pardon them most anything.
"That the clock was going at the time the shelves fell, and that he should be the one to draw our attention to it would seem to the superficial mind proof positive that he was innocent of the deed with which it was so closely associated," the detective proceeded. "But to one skilled in the subterfuges of criminals, this seemingly conclusive fact in his favor was capable of an explanation so in keeping with the subtlety shown in every other feature of this remarkable crime, that I began to regard it as a point against him rather than in his favor. Of which more hereafter.
"Not allowing myself to be deterred, then, by this momentary set-back, and rejoicing in an affair considered as settled by my superiors, I proceeded to establish Franklin Van Burnam's connection with the crime which had been laid with so much apparent reason at his brother's door.
"The first fact to be settled was, of course, whether your identification of him as the gentleman who accompanied his victim into Mr. Van Burnam's house could be corroborated by any of the many persons who had seen the so-called Mr. James Pope at the Hotel D——.