“Do you know exactly what the club-house’s wine-vault contained?” he asked.
“An inventory was given me by the steward the morning we closed. It must be in my rooms.”
“Your rooms have been examined. You expected that, didn’t you? Probably this inventory has been found. I don’t suppose it will help any.”
“How should it?”
“Very true; how should it! No thoroughfare there, of course.”
“No thoroughfare anywhere to-day,” I exclaimed. “To-morrow some loop-hole of escape may suggest itself to me. I should like to sleep on the matter. I—I should like to sleep on it.”
He saw that I had something in mind of which I had thus far given him no intimation, and he waited anxiously for me to reconsider my last words before he earnestly remarked:
“A day lost at a time like this is often a day never retrieved. Think well before you bid me leave you, unenlightened as to the direction in which you wish me to work.”
But I was not ready, not by any means ready, and he detected this when I next spoke.
“I will see you to-morrow; any time to-morrow; meantime I will give you a commission which you are at liberty to perform yourself or to entrust to some capable detective. The letter, of which a portion remains, was written to Carmel, and she sent me a reply which was handed me on the station platform by a man who was a perfect stranger to me. I have hardly any memory of how the man looked, but it should be an easy task to find him and if you cannot do that, the smallest scrap of the note he gave me, and which unfortunately I tore up and scattered to the winds, would prove my veracity in this one particular and so make it easier for them to believe the rest.”