"I should like to talk to you about her some time," he said, in a careful whisper. "If anything happens—don't hesitate to call on me."
Before Mrs. Rogers could recover from her surprise Kennedy had said good-by and we were on our way to the laboratory.
"That's a curious situation," I observed. "Can you make it out? How does Shirley fit into this thing?"
Craig hesitated a moment, as though debating whether to say anything, even to me, about his suspicions.
"Suppose," he said, slowly, "that Shirley was a secret agent of the
British government, charged with the mission of finding out whether
Mrs. Rogers was contributing—unknowingly, perhaps—to hatching another
Indian mutiny? Would that suggest anything to you?"
"And the nautch-girl whom he had known in Calcutta followed him, hoping to worm from him the secrets which he—"
"Not too fast," he cautioned. "Let us merely suppose that Shirley was a spy. If I am not mistaken, we shall see something happen soon, as a result of what I said to Mrs. Rogers."
Excited now by the possibilities opened up by his conjecture regarding Shirley, which I knew must have amounted to a certainty in his mind, I watched him impatiently, as he calmly set to work cleaning up the remainder of the laboratory investigation in the affair.
It was scarcely half an hour later that a car drove up furiously to our door and Mrs. Rogers burst in, terribly agitated.
"You remember," she cried, breathlessly, "you said that a jequirity bean was sent to Captain Shirley?"