The bribe was great, yet great was poor Lady McIntyre's misgiving. Men of another class would have stood no chance of overcoming her scruples. Oh, the Intelligence Department was not so blundering as some would have us believe, since upon a presumably very minor case it could expend this patience and finesse.
Lady McIntyre fluttered to the guarded door. "I couldn't let them do it with no one here." She clung an instant to Napier's arm.
He and Singleton glanced up and down corridor and stair, as the three men followed Lady McIntyre's lead into a room at the end of a passage.
The first thing noticeable about the little room was its air of distinction, bred only in part by the taste shown in the choice of certain articles of furniture, culled, Napier was sure, from other parts of the house during that week Miss Greta had spent alone here. Not her knowledge of values in Möbeln alone, but something less obvious, in the serene, uncrowded aspect, in the exquisite orderliness, lent the little room its special air.
Singleton walked straight to the window. It commanded the approach to the house and looked upon the sea. It wasn't till a moment later that Napier verified this fact. On the dressing table, which stood out two feet or so in front of the window, his eyes had found a faded photograph. It showed a girl in her teens at another window. Two long plaits fell over the sill as the eager figure leaned out to greet, with all that joy and affection, the woman whom Napier was here to convict of felony and to cover with disgrace. No need of the signature under the sill to say the girl was "Miss Greta's ever loving Nan."
That first cursory glance about the room had seemed both to please and intrigue Singleton. His face wore the look of intentness, of subdued satisfaction, with which your sportsman addresses himself to a game he knows he's good at.
"He likes ferreting things out! He likes it!" Napier said to himself, as Singleton swung back with one of his easy movements and turned the key in the door.
"What will Greta think when she tries it and finds it locked, and me in here!" Lady McIntyre bemoaned to Napier.
"Oh, but she won't," answered Singleton. He nodded toward the window. "You'll see her coming." He laid down hat, stick, and gloves on the small table by the bed, and picked up a book lying there. He read aloud the title, "Pilgerfahrt by Gerhard," for Grindley's benefit, apparently, for he looked at that person interrogatively. "With Nan's love," he added, as though that might fetch Grindley.
But Grindley seemed to have neither literary nor sentimental curiosity. By the tall gilt screen set against the angle of the opposite wall Grindley halted, as if he had forgotten why he was there and felt unequal to the mental effort of recalling. You'd say he no more realized that the leaves of the screen were turned back so as almost to meet the angle described by the wall, than that the panels were composed of exquisite engravings after Fragonard, set in old gilt. Even when he moved a pace or two, you would say that he was speculating whereabouts in a room so scantily, albeit so charmingly, furnished as to boast only a single chair, should he find a place whereon to lay hat and stick, and the small despatch-case of the same color as the brown clothes he wore. Whether for that reason, or because of the inconspicuous way in which it was carried, Napier had not noticed the case till Grindley set it down against the skirting of the wall, along with hat and stick.