"Oh—oculists use it, do they?" repeated Doyle, running true to form. "Ah—I see."
He looked about, from one to the other of us, knowingly. No one said anything as he continued to gaze with superior slyness at us, regarding us as poor simpletons who were unable to see through a millstone with a hole in it.
"I see—I see," he added. "Honora—Chappelle. That was her name before she was married. Her father was a Frenchman, Honore Chappelle—an oculist—well known in the city before he died. Oh, that's very important, then, that about this bean and the physostigmine, or whatever you call it. And, Leslie, you say you've discovered that some one—a woman—was here early in the evening. Can't we put two and two together? She's lying when she says she wasn't out of that house, she is. So is that Celeste, the hussy. Depend on it, she was here. I'm on the right track, all right," Doyle concluded with a cocksure shake of the head that was more irritating than any amount of ignorance on his part would have been.
I did not reply. I understood the purport of the broad insinuation that Doyle was making. Also, I saw the real reason of Kennedy's remark to me, cautioning me to make haste slowly in deducing anything from the, as yet, slender facts of the case.
I thought a moment. Far from eliminating anybody, the discovery of the Calabar bean left us scarcely a bit ahead of where we had been before. With a keen repulsion against the very idea and its implications as seen by the astute Doyle, I still was forced to admit that Honora Wilford's father had been an oculist and that it was perfectly true that she had every opportunity to have learned of the ordeal bean and its drug. Yet I kept asking myself what, after all, that might mean.
Purposely Kennedy reverted to the Calabar bean and the remarks of Doyle that had started the conversation.
"If Shattuck gets too brash," hinted Kennedy, "spring this information on him. Perhaps it might interest him."
As he said it, I remembered what Craig had said in the laboratory only a short time before—that he was going to tell part of what he had found, as he went along, in the hope that the actions of each suspect who heard it might perhaps betray some thing. There was some crumb of comfort in that, I felt, as far as Honora herself was concerned. Yet I felt uncomfortable and misgiving.
We parted from Leslie and Doyle, and as we went up-town again I could not help remarking that somehow the apparent effort of Shattuck to hamper us was suspicious. Kennedy said very little, but when we got off at the station on the Subway just before our own, I saw that he was not yet through.
It did not take long to elicit from him the information that, while he felt he could trust Doyle to convey the information about the discovery and the drug to both Shattuck and Honora before long, the case was different as far as Vina and Doctor Lathrop were concerned.