Before I had time to reply he had slipped in through a doorway at which hung the familiar blue sign.
In a minute or two he rejoined me, and said: "Now let's dismiss the whole affair from our minds until after luncheon. It is never wise to let business interfere with digestion."
As we rode up home in the car, Mr. Stone was most agreeable and entertaining. Not a word was said of the Pembroke case—he seemed really to have laid aside all thought of it—and yet I couldn't help a sinister conviction that when he telephoned it had been a message to headquarters, authorizing the surveillance, if not the arrest, of somebody. It couldn't be Lawrence, in the face of that alibi; it couldn't be Janet, for he knew next to nothing about her connection with the matter; it couldn't be Charlotte, of course; and so it must have been "some person or persons unknown" to me.
I felt no hesitancy, so far as Laura was concerned, in taking home an unexpected guest, for it was my habit to do that whenever I chose, and I had never found Laura otherwise than pleased to see my friends, and amply able to provide hospitality for them. But, as we neared the house, I remembered Janet's strange disinclination to employ a detective, and her apparent horror at the mention of Fleming Stone's name.
Feeling that honesty demanded it, I told Fleming Stone exactly what Janet had said on this subject when I had left the house that morning. Though apparently not disturbed personally by Miss Pembroke's attitude toward him, he seemed to consider it as of definite importance for some other reason.
"Why should Miss Pembroke object to a detective's services," he said, "when, as you have told me, Mr. Lawrence said at your dinner table last night that he wanted to engage the best possible detective skill?"
"I don't know," I replied. "I'm puzzled myself. But I admit, Mr. Stone, that Miss Pembroke has been an enigma to me from the first. Not only do I believe her innocent, but I have a warmer regard for her than I am perhaps justified in mentioning to a stranger; and yet she is so contradictory in her speech and action from time to time that I simply do not know what to think."
Fleming Stone turned a very kind glance on me. "The hardest puzzle in this world," he said, "is a woman. Of course I do not know Miss Pembroke, but I hope she will consent to meet me, notwithstanding her aversion to detectives."
"I think she will," I said; "and, besides, she is so changeable that at this moment she may be more anxious to see a detective than anybody else."
"Let us hope so," he said somewhat gravely. "It may be much to her advantage."