"Nothing! Not a thing!" breathed the lady.
Three pairs of eyes had fallen simultaneously on a letter which had been underneath the roll of paper—a letter unaddressed, in a sealed envelope. Grindley opened it. Singleton leaned over to read it, too. All that Napier could see was that the communication appeared to be in German script, not written compactly, as the national instinct for economy seems to inculcate. The lines were wide apart. Grindley's thick finger, traversing the blank space, seemed to emphasize this fact.
"Nothing there," said Singleton, dipping his hand in the box again.
"Nothing that jumps to the eye." Grindley laid letter and envelope on the floor by the tracing-paper. Out of a shallow cardboard box, full of numbered films, Singleton had briskly helped himself to one after another. He held each in turn up to the light—held the first two so that Grindley could see them.
"To keep such things! It's the kind of extraordinarily rash things they do." A look of understanding passed between the two secret-service men.
"They?" inquired Lady McIntyre, and as no one answered, "Rash?" She turned her helpless eyes on Napier. "What a world to live in, when to take a little picnic snap-shots is 'rash'!"
"You have a dark room? She develops her own photographs?"
Lady McIntyre swung her ear-rings.
While Singleton was running rapidly through the picture series, Grindley took out a book—a leather-covered book, with a lock.
"A diary, that is, just like mine," said Lady McIntyre. "Her diary had a lock, too," she said. But the fact did not save this one from desecration. Off came the lock at the edge of the chisel, and Grindley was bending his head over pages of exquisite writing. That it was German, seemed in no wise to disconcert Grindley. "Plain sailing," was his comment as he handed the book over to Singleton, who, with a kind of affectionate regret, put down the two films he had been studying side by side. "Very instructive, seen seriatim," he remarked, as he swept them toward the case, and took the diary.