"Oh, for many reasons. Had he, on approaching, found the nurse not sufficiently under the influence of the drug, he could have pretended to wish to speak to her, on some trivial matter. Again, the child would go away with him of course without making an outcry, which he would probably not have done, with a stranger. There are other reasons. He no doubt took the boy to the road, and handed him to his confederates, passing in another car. The affair occurred, you will remember, in a little frequented part of the Bois.
"The subsequent actions of Mary Lanahan are a trifle difficult to account for; but I suppose them to have been as follows: On slowly coming out of her stupor, and realizing that the boy was gone, she was terribly frightened. It had seemed to her but a moment since she turned away. She fears that the cigarette has made her drowsy—she has heard that they sometimes contain opium. She thinks she may have dozed off; but is not willing to admit it. Especially does she not want her employers to know that she uses cigarettes. She fears that such knowledge would cost her her place. It is not until later that she begins to suspect the cigarettes."
"When is that?" inquired Lefevre.
"Several days later, when she is supposed to have been poisoned. She was with Valentin at the time; although, on account of Mr. Stapleton's dislike for him, she feared to admit it. She smokes another of the cigarettes, while sitting on a bench with him, in the Champs Élysées. Suddenly she is taken ill—a frequent result of hashish, when taken in excessive doses, or by one otherwise nervously upset. Valentin takes the box, puts her into a cab, and goes to his room, where he leaves the cigarettes. No doubt, as she begins to feel ill, she discusses with him the possibility of the cigarettes having been poisoned. It is for that reason that she gives them to him.
"Her sudden message to Valentin to destroy them arose from a fear that I would discover the part which they had played in the boy's loss. This would, she knew, not only cost her her place, but would make her, in a way, responsible for the entire affair. She feared Mr. Stapleton's wrath, and therefore both she and Valentin remained dumb, so far as the cigarettes were concerned.
"They both, however, were all this time doing their best to find the child. Her message to Valentin, that she was suspicious of François, telling Valentin to watch him, arose no doubt from a realization that the box of drugged cigarettes had been substituted for her own by the chauffeur.
"Valentin, acting on her advice, does watch François, as his presence clinging to the rear of the latter's car the other night has proved. He tells me, today, that François did not take his car to the garage that night at all. The men there who so testified lied, at his request, supposing it merely an excuse to cover a joy ride.
"François, not wishing that the drugged cigarettes should remain in the nurse's hands as evidence against him, evidently made an attempt to recover them, discovered that she had turned them over to Valentin, and, being watched himself, sent word of the matter to his confederate, the fellow who went about in the black beard. He must have been admitted to Mr. Stapleton's house that night by François himself.
"I came to the conclusion, early in the course of my investigations, that the cigarette, the end of which I had found in the Bois, had been smoked by Mary Lanahan, and I so told Mr. Stapleton."
The banker nodded. "Yes," he said; "but you did not then say anything about the hashish."