Summoning up her courage and meeting each inquiring eye with a look which seemed to carry a different message to each, she remarked very quietly:
“This is not a matter to guess at. I must have time and I must look a little deeper into the facts just given me. I presume that the table I see over there is the one upon which Mr. Upjohn laid the manuscript during Mr. Spielhagen’s unconsciousness.”
All nodded.
“Is it—I mean the table—in the same condition it was then? Has nothing been taken from it except the manuscript?”
“Nothing.”
“Then the missing page is not there,” she smiled, pointing to its bare top. A pause, during which she stood with her gaze fixed on the floor before her. She was thinking and thinking hard.
Suddenly she came to a decision. Addressing Mr. Upjohn she asked if he were quite sure that in taking the manuscript from Mr. Spielhagen’s hand he had neither disarranged nor dropped one of its pages.
The answer was unequivocal.
“Then,” she declared, with quiet assurance and a steady meeting with her own of every eye, “as the thirteenth page was not found among the others when they were taken from this table, nor on the persons of either Mr. Cornell or Mr. Spielhagen, it is still in that inner room.”
“Impossible!” came from every lip, each in a different tone. “That room is absolutely empty.”