“How long would you say they had been coming? Could you give a time?” questioned Anthony.
She puckered her brows as she sat there and thought over the question.
“Let me help you with a suggestion,” broke in Anthony. “Would it be correct to say that they commenced to come somewhere about the time that Alan Warburton’s visits began to get less frequent? Could you agree with that?”
“Let me think” she answered. The three men watched her closely. “As far as I can remember the first time I saw this handwriting was about Eastertide last year. I think it was on the Maundy Thursday. Yes, it was about then when young Warburton stopped coming here. Let me think again. If I’ve given you the impression that his visits gradually dropped off, I’m afraid I’ve confused you. They didn’t—now I can think more clearly. They stopped quite suddenly—I should say a month or so before I noticed these letters and things coming. I know!”—she concluded on a note of triumphant remembrance. “He hasn’t been here since the Hunt Ball at Westhampton—early last year.”
Mr. Bathurst felt his blood course a little more fiercely through his veins. He remembered the trenchant query that he had put to himself upon the occasion of his first visit from the Crown Prince of Clorania. “What was it that had happened at the Hunt Ball at Westhampton in the February of the previous year?” Find the right answer to that, he argued to himself and he would go a long distance towards solving the entire mystery. Bannister’s thoughts were evidently following similar lines for the expression on his face showed that he thought “Pinkie’s” statement to be extremely important.
“That was in the February,” she continued, “only a few weeks before Major Carruthers was killed in his motoring accident. I’m certain, now I come to think of it, that young Mr. Warburton hasn’t been here to see Miss Sheila since then.” She spiced her statement with unmistakable emphasis and certainty.
“Did you notice this change in Miss Delaney that you speak of immediately after?” queried Anthony.
“After when?”
“After this Ball that you have mentioned?”
She thought for a while before she answered. “Yes, I think I can say now that it was after that, that she began to alter. Just a little. Perhaps some people wouldn’t have noticed it. But in small ways——”