"Disgraceful!" said Lady McIntyre under her breath. Singleton was passing his hands along the row of skirts neatly hung at the side. The investigating fingers reached those other garments suspended at a greater height. From supports, hooked upon a bar set overhead, depended afternoon and evening gowns—the pink cotton, the black and gold, the lemon-colored—all of familiar aspect, and yet in this collapsed state odd-looking, defenseless, taken at disadvantage. Napier with some difficulty recognized the apple-green silk, all its sauciness gone, as dejected now as a deflated balloon. And this stranger's hand upon them!
"Disgusting familiarity, I call it. He'll be feeling in her pockets next," Lady McIntyre whispered tremulously. "I don't know how I can bear to be here."
Napier himself was too aware of a Peeping-Tom unseemliness in looking in upon these privacies to stand there watching. He turned again to the glittering dressing table and the treasure it enshrined. What wouldn't he give to be able to slip that photograph in his pocket? Nan looked at him out of her window with unsullied trust.
Napier glanced nervously out of the other, the window behind the dressing-table. While he had been watching Singleton and looking at the pictured face, Nan might easily have come into the house; for Lady McIntyre, too, had clean forgotten that side of her sentinelship.
Napier turned round, so palpably listening, that even Lady McIntyre in the midst of her agitations saw what must be in his mind.
"Yes, any moment they'll be in upon us!" She fled again to the window.
"Grindley, here!" Singleton called from the cupboard.
But Grindley had found something, at last, which, though it seemed not to interest him, had proved itself worthy to be abstracted. Not one of the love letters, as Lady McIntyre plainly feared. It was nothing more exciting than Greta's French dictionary. Grindley came away from the littered bureau, holding the flat volume open in his hand, and turning the leaves at random.
Singleton joined him. "What have you got there?"
"La Motte's Dictionary."