“But what in the cellar would make a mark like that?”
“Dunno, Ziz. There’s no green paint down there.”
“It isn’t paint, Penny,” Zizi persisted. “It doesn’t smell like paint.”
“What does it smell like?”
“There’s no odor to it, that I can notice. But it’s a clue.”
“So’s the yellow pillow,—so are the scattered beads,—so was the footprint of cellar dust on the library floor,—but they’re all blind clues,—they lead nowhere.”
“Penny Wise! what ails you? I never knew you so ready to lie down on a job!”
“No, Zizi, not that. It’s only that I can see how futile and useless all these clues are. We’ve got to get some bigger evidence. In fact, we can do nothing till we find the way the criminal got in and out of this house. Don’t tease me, Zizi, I never was so put about!”
“You must be, when you revert to your old-fashioned phrases!” the girl laughed at him, but there was deepest sympathy in her dark eyes, and an affectionate, brooding glance told of her anxiety for him.
Yet the carpenters found nothing. They proved beyond all possible doubt that there was no secret passage between the interior of Headland House and the outer world,—that there could be none, for every inch of space was investigated and accounted for.