"Not another word, Doris, or we'll be caught!" He laughed shortly, strode to a switch and flooded the room with light. There was a limit even to his loyalty.
Five minutes later he left the house with a tidy brown-paper parcel under his arm.
In her room Doris fell on her knees, and when thanksgiving and petitions were ended remained in that position, thinking. And one of her thoughts was rather a strange question: "Why am I not more glad—madly glad—that Alan is alive?" And she remembered that she had sent no message.
CHAPTER XVI
About four o'clock Bullard came into his private office full of ill-suppressed wrath. Lancaster, who had been waiting for him in fear and trembling, looked a mute enquiry.
"Yes," said Bullard harshly, "I found the beast after losing all those precious hours, and I may tell you at once, he had nothing whatever to do with the disappearance of the Green Box from your cabinet. He accounted for all his doings after leaving Earl's Gate, and I was able to verify his story. He went straight to a filthy gambling hell, lost a lot of money and got dead drunk. He's not decently sober yet."
"Then who could have done it?" Lancaster forced himself to say.
"Spare me idiotic questions! What I want to know is why on earth you did not take better care of the box."
"I daresay I ought to have put it in my safe," the other stammered, "but you left it with me as if it was nothing to you, and it—it really had become of so little value—comparatively—"
"Of little value! Why, its value to us might have been immense. The stones are paste, but what does that prove? Simply that Christopher's real stones are elsewhere. Christopher wasn't such a fool after all, and Caw has not tricked us wittingly. Caw imagines we've got the real stones right enough. At first I thought it might be otherwise, but my new theory is the one to hold water. The stones we saw that afternoon in Grey House were the stones we looked on last night—"