“Yes,” came Llewellyn’s quick response, almost automatically. “Mr. Charles Stewart and I noticed that when we first found the body.”
“What do you think its meaning is?”
Llewellyn raised his eyebrows in interrogation. The poise of his head and the somewhat peremptory significance contained in his gesture, accentuated his suggestion of superciliousness.
He held out his hand. “May I see it again? I hardly——”
Clegg took the paper from beneath the dead man’s hand. “Not much to go on, I admit! But Mr. Stewart had evidently received important news of some kind that he regarded as very urgent. To sit down to write it there and then——” he stopped abruptly. “M. L.” he quoted. “They might be a person’s initials even,” he declared.
Stewart felt a flood of sudden excitement run through his veins. He watched Llewellyn’s face keenly and could not avoid seeing the sudden glint flash through the striking eyes. But once again the flame was but momentary and died down as quickly as it had been born.
When the secretary answered he was coolness personified. “They might. It’s very probable. They might even be mine. I am called Morgan Llewellyn.”
He paused and watched the effect of his declaration upon his questioner. Then continued, even cooler than he had appeared before, “But I can suggest no good reason to make me think that they are.”
Both Clegg and Charles Stewart watched him very closely. And to each of them there came the feeling—in the first case, slowly and of deliberation, and in the second case, quickly and instinctively—that his coolness was assumed and his seemingly frank indifference something of a calculated pose.
Clegg harked back. “Going back a little way, Mr. Llewellyn, you stated that you last saw Mr. Stewart at dinner. What happened after dinner?”