"You know a great deal, it seems."
"More than you think," I retorted.
She flushed again, and bit her lips to restrain their trembling.
"Though there's one thing I don't know," I went on, determined to strike home, if I could. "I can't imagine why Miss Lawrence should have chosen your house as a place of refuge. She must know that you hate her—that you waited, like a snake in ambush, for the moment when the blow would pierce most deeply; she must see that you are using her to avenge yourself——"
A sharp click interrupted me, and I found myself in darkness. I heard the closing of a door, the turning of a lock. When, after a moment's groping along the wall, I found the electric button and switched on the light again, I saw that the door leading from the library to the hall was closed. I tried it—it was locked.
"Good-night, Mr. Lester," called a low mocking voice from the other side. "Please turn off the light before you go, and close the window after you. Another thing—I'd advise you not to disturb my sister again to-night; it would really not be safe. And I hope you'll let me know when you succeed in clearing up those little points you were speaking of—I'm immensely interested in them."
She laughed again, and I heard her footsteps die away down the hall.
Feeling absurdly foolish, I switched off the light, and left the house. Plainly, Lucy Kingdon had ceased to fear me. She believed that she had won the fight, that her position was impregnable. Either she thought that Marcia Lawrence had escaped, that we had not traced her to the Umbria, or she knew that the telegram was a blind, and that we had been misled by it. Which was right, I wondered. And she must have come off well, too, in that interview with Mrs. Lawrence, which I would have given so much to have overheard—must have convinced her of her innocence, else she would not still be employed as a maid in the Lawrence house, and retained so near her mistress. How had she done it? How had she succeeded in blinding her mistress so completely?
Then a sudden thought stabbed through me. Was it possible, I asked myself, that Mrs. Lawrence had been a party to the deception—that she had knowingly assisted in the farce of the telegram, for my benefit? But, as I reviewed her behaviour at our morning interview, I could not believe it. She was no such consummate actress as that would imply. If I was a dupe, then she was a dupe also.
Busy with this problem, I made my way through the grove along the path back to the Kingdon cottage, and stood for a moment looking over the hedge before opening the gate. There was a light in the room which I took to be the dining-room, but even as I gazed at it, the light moved, a shadow crossed the blind; the light reappeared in the kitchen, faded and disappeared—then, a moment later, my heart leaped suffocatingly as I perceived a glimmer of light at the ventilator in the foundation! What was this woman doing in the cellar? What was the task that was going forward there?