He had begun to descend the stairs into the entrance-hall, when he saw—with something of a shock—coming up, and therefore about to meet him, the lady whom he believed to be in the next suite to Ziegler's, advising her partners through the communicating door. He had got it firmly into his head that during the twenty minutes he had been kept waiting that door had been opened, and the terms of the letter settled between the two principals; and here was Mrs. Talmage Eglinton not in her rooms at all, but apparently only just arrived.
"Ah, Mr. Forsyth!" she cried, coquettishly. "You have been up to my suite to look for me, with a view to standing me a luncheon somewhere. Now don't deny that you were disappointed when you found that I had not reached the hotel and that the suite was locked up."
Could he have been mistaken? Forsyth asked himself. If so, the mistake was not really his, but General Sadgrove's, and the entire bottom was knocked out of the veteran's theory as to this woman's complicity.
"But I have not been up to your rooms," was all he could reply on the spur of the moment. "I had business with the gentleman who occupies the adjoining suite."
If it was not genuine, the look of disappointment that stole into her face was a consummate piece of acting. "Oh, was that all," she said, with a queer little laugh. "Well, that doesn't absolve you from asking me to lunch now that you have the chance."
"I shall be delighted," was the only answer he could make without showing open hostility.
"Wait in the hall, then," said Mrs. Talmage Eglinton. "I am only going up to see if some jewelry I left locked up when I went down to Prior's Tarrant is safe."
She hurried up the remaining stairs, and Forsyth continued his way down to the hall, a prey to conflicting emotions. Disgust at having to lunch with a woman he abhorred was the least of them. What worried him most at that moment was the doubt, restored by this meeting, whether Mrs. Talmage Eglinton was not, after all, the victim of a chain of coincidences.
And then, suddenly, a flicker of light broke on the situation through—of all places in the world—a tiny flaw in the lady's defensive armor. She had spoken of her suite as locked up, but he remembered now that the outer door of it had been slightly ajar when he went in to his interview with Ziegler. He went up to the big uniformed porter on duty at the swing doors, and asked him if he knew Mrs. Talmage Eglinton by sight.
"Oh yes, sir," the man replied. "You'll catch her if you run up to her rooms sharp. She's just going out."