“That he was in a deuce of a fiddlestick! He’d have gone on straight down the drive if that is all. No! The inference to my way of thinking is that he never was going down the drive at all.”
“Oh? Where was he going, then?”
“Back into the house again! Alec, it’s beginning to look as if that Mysterious Stranger of ours may be going the same way as Mr. John Prince.”
CHAPTER XVIII.
What the Settee Had to Tell
Alec stared incredulously. “Back into the house? But—but what on earth would he want to be going back into the house for?”
“Ah, now you’re asking me something. I haven’t the least idea. I don’t even know that he was going back into the house. All I say is that that is the only inference I can draw from the fact of these pieces of vase being where they are. It’s possibly quite wrong.”
“But look here, if he wanted to go into the house again, why on earth should he have taken the trouble to climb out of the window like that? Why didn’t he just go out of the library door?”
“Obviously because he wanted to leave all ways into or out of the library fastened on the inside, in order to further the idea of suicide.”
“But why should he have gone back into the house at all? That’s what I can’t understand.”
“Well,” Roger remarked very casually, “supposing he lived there?”