The girl came, wondering.
“Mary?” said Fleming Stone, inquiringly.
“Jane, sir,” returned the maid, quietly.
“Good,” said Stone. “You have intelligence, Jane, as shown by your calm rejoinder. Now, I want you to go to the various bedrooms or dressing-rooms of all the members of the family and of all the servants, and bring me all the manicure scissors you can find. I assume that some of the servants might possibly have them?”
“Yes, sir, some of them.”
“Very well. Get all you can possibly find, and be very, very careful to remember which ones are whose. Understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then go. If anybody questions you, say Mr. Stone ordered it.”
Jane returned with many pairs of the kind of scissors asked for by the Detective. Absorbedly, Stone took them from her, and one by one he used them to snip at a sheet of paper from the library desk.
At each test, he asked Jane whose the scissors were, and sometimes he wrote the name beside the cut and sometimes not. One pair in especial seemed to interest him. “Whose are these?” he asked.