“So I see. He has got your clothes-prop through the palings and is dragging the ball towards him. That’s nothing. I used to steal apples that way when I was a boy.”
“But does not that explain what you were talking about?”
“What! You think the murder might have been committed with a clothes-prop?”
“No, I don’t say anything of the kind. But it might have been somehow in the same way.”
“Bell, you’re mad! Wash up the tea-things, that’s more in your line. I’ll have a smoke.”
Hobbs sat and puffed the blue clouds, and so deep was he lost in thought that his lips puffed mechanically long after his pipe had gone out.
This idea of Bell’s was filtering into his mind. At first regarding it as absurd, he gradually came to think it possible, then probable; finally, he was morally certain there was a basis of truth in it. But not a word of his revulsion of feeling did he let fall to Mrs. Hobbs. In fact, he was quite convinced from that time forth that the idea was all his own.
“Burning! Burning!” he said to himself, with reference to an old game of hide-and-seek that he was wont to play in his boyhood, this being the cry of the fellow players when the seeker was near the object sought.
Burning! Burning! He felt he was touching the key to the mystery at last.
An hour might have passed, when he jumped up with a loud exclamation—