"In that case, sir, the missus can put you up too, if you don't mind a shake-down. There's room enough for all."
"I can make you comfortable in the parlour," said Mrs. Giles, thinking of ways and means, "the lady can sleep in the spare bedroom."
"With Lucinda," put in Miss Destiny. "She is outside with the trap, and if you will see that the horse is put into some stable and that Lucinda is brought in to have supper, you will be conferring a great favour on me. I really couldn't sleep without Lucinda, as my nerves are not what they ought to be, and this dreadful occurrence has upset them greatly."
Giles, who seemed to be singularly generous and hospitable, nodded and went out to see after Lucinda and the trap, while Mrs. Giles boiled a couple of eggs for the visitor who had so unexpectedly appeared. Mrs. Faith, with her hands on her hips, and her dark face alive with curiosity, stared hard at the frail figure of the shabby little lady. "About the glass eye," she asked eagerly, with a side glance at me, "which this gentleman took?"
"I didn't take it," I said sharply, for the way in which the woman assumed me to be guilty was unbearable. "So far as I remember, Mrs. Caldershaw had two eyes when I saw her body, though, to be sure, I might have been mistaken, seeing I had only a match. And I was mistaken," I added vigorously, "for if the woman who stole my motor car took the eye, she must have done so before I saw the corpse. But why should the eye be stolen?" I looked at Miss Destiny for an answer.
The little old lady shook her head. "It's the oddest thing," she said at length and in a lively manner. "When Anne was my brother's housekeeper, it was well known that she had a glass eye to which she appeared to attach a ridiculous value. She often declared that she would not lose it for a fortune. What she meant I can't say; but since the eye has been stolen, she must have meant something."
"It's remarkably strange," I muttered, for the mystery of the eye was beginning to attract me. "Have you no idea----"
"I know nothing more than I have told you," said Miss Destiny sharply. "By the way, how did Anne die?"
"No one knows," said Mrs. Faith, determined to join in the conversation and restless at having kept silence for so long. "Frampton declared that she had a fit."
"Nonsense. Anne, so far as I know, never had fits. A lean, spare woman such as Anne was, could not have a fit."