The butler's bosom swelled, but his countenance remained wooden. "This way, if you please, gentlemen!" he said.
He led them majestically up a broad stairway to the drawing-room on the first floor, and paused outside it to demand their names. He appeared to think poorly of them, but declared them meticulously: "Chief Inspector Hemingway and Inspector Grant, my lady!"
The two detectives passed into the room, and the door was closed behind them.
"Good-morning," said Lady Nest, from a chair by the fire. "Won't you sit down?"
The room smelled of Egyptian cigarettes and hothouse roses, bowls of which stood on several tables and chests. It was furnished with a mixture of careless good taste and evanescent vulgarity. Nailed to the wall above a superb example of XVIIth century cabinet-making was the coloured plaster-head of a slant-eyed female, obviously the product of a disordered imagination; cheek by jowl with a charming piece of Wedgwood stood a bowl of ornate barbola-work, filled with potpourri; a portrait resembling nothing so much as the jumbled pieces of a jig-saw puzzle hung beside a Girtin water-colour; and enormous photographs of persons seen through a fog stood in ranks upon several spindlelegged tables. While his chief trod across the Aubusson carpet, with its design of sprawling flowers, to the fireplace, Inspector Grant retired discreetly to a chair beside one of these tables, and surveyed with dispassionate interest the portraits standing upon it. One of them, depicting the head of a handsome man, whose excellent teeth were displayed in a flashing smile, caught and held his attention. It bore little resemblance to the distorted features the Inspector had seen in Mrs. Haddington's boudoir, but it was inscribed across one corner, in dashing characters: "Ever yours, Dan Seaton-Carew."
Hemingway, meanwhile, had seated himself opposite Lady Nest, uttering a conventional apology for troubling her.
"Oh, not at all! I don't mind!" said Lady Nest. "It's about poor Dan Seaton-Carew, isn't it? Do you think I can help you? I will, if I can, but I don't quite see how."
"We have to check up, you see, Lady Nest," Hemingway explained. "I understand that you knew Mr. Seaton-Carew very well?"
She brushed some cigarette-ash from the skirt of her exquisitely plain black frock; her thin, beautiful hands had a brittle appearance, and seemed always to be fluttering. It occurred to Hemingway that he had seldom met a more restless woman. She made him think of a butterfly, at the lag end of the season, its wings a little tattered, but still flitting aimlessly here and there. "Oh, yes! Quite well!" she said.
"Perhaps you can tell me something about him?" Hemingway suggested. "What, for instance, was his profession, or was he in business?"