"What was that stuff?" he demanded of the oblivious Grindley.
"Usually snuff and cayenne," Singleton answered for him. "Harmless, unless it's flung into the eyes."
"Flung in!" gasped Lady McIntyre, receiving, as it were, full in the face her first staggering suspicion.
"If you get only a whiff, the thing to do is to gargle and bathe the eyes," Singleton advised politely, and fell upon his book again, like some intrigued reader of romance.
Lady McIntyre declined to go away to bathe and gargle. She sat wiping her streaming eyes and letting loose an occasional sneeze.
There still remained in the boot box, as Napier had seen, two modest-sized receptacles to be examined. One was of nickel or silver; the other, a trifle larger, appeared, as Grindley lifted it out, to be an ordinary japanned cash-box, with the key sticking in the lock.
"Achew! chew! chew!" said Lady McIntyre, trying to clear her watery vision, the better to verify the fact that the box was full of English gold—most of it done up in amateur rouleaux of twenty pounds each, sealed at each end.
Surprising, but not criminal, Lady McIntyre's inflamed face seemed to say. "Maybe," she wedged the words in between a couple of less violent sneezes; already she was steadying herself after the shock of knowing that gray bag of devilment in Greta's possession—"maybe she is custodian—others'—savings—some refugee."
Grindley had tumbled the rouleaux and the loose gold into his handkerchief. He knotted it and threw it into his case.
"I shall tell her!" Lady McIntyre's still streaming eyes arraigned him. "She shall know you've got it."