“Yes,” admitted Westenhanger, rather crestfallen to find that another person had arrived at the same conclusion by the same line of reasoning.
“But Eric didn’t take the Talisman,” the old man continued. “You will have to take my word for that. I can’t, of course, prove it to you. It’s a difficult business, proving a negative. But I give you my word of honour that Eric didn’t take it. Eric knows what he knows. He wouldn’t take it.”
“You mean the Dangerfield Secret?” demanded Westenhanger, astonished to find that matter cropping up in this connection.
“If you choose to call it so,” said old Rollo, dismissing the matter by his tone. “But if I am not supposed to be shielding Eric—and I am not shielding him, as I told you—then it must be . . .”
He broke off sharply and held up his hand in caution. Westenhanger, listening with all his ears, heard the faint sound of a step on the staircase. Rollo rose silently to his feet with another gesture of warning and stepped lightly over to the door. Almost as he reached it, Helga’s figure appeared in the corridor. She passed without a look aside, though the glare of the lighted room fell full on her face as she went by.
Old Rollo softly switched on the corridor lights and fell in behind her. Westenhanger, picking his steps with caution, followed. Helga, unconscious of their presence, led them down to the door of the Corinthian’s Room, which she entered. Westenhanger had a hope that possibly her movements might throw light upon the mystery; but when he reached the door, Rollo had switched on the lights, and it soon grew clear that she had no interest in the cabinet. She wandered aimlessly about the room for a time, then returned to the door and came out again, the two men standing aside to let her pass.
Rollo waited until she had gone some distance down the corridor, then he whispered to Westenhanger.
“Please put out the lights; I must see her safely back to her room.”
Their figures retreated down the stretch, turned at the staircase and disappeared. Westenhanger waited for a time. Then, remembering the original object of his journey, he passed into the library, selected a book, and went upstairs to his room, after extinguishing the lights. But his book helped him very little.
“Old Rollo was speaking the truth, I’m sure. He doesn’t believe Eric’s mixed up in the thing at all,” he mused. “But that doesn’t necessarily prove that Eric didn’t take it after all. We’ve eliminated everyone except Eric. He’s the only one who fits the facts. And yet old Dangerfield spoke as if he had absolute certainty. What was it he said? ‘He knows what he knows.’ But what does he know? This Dangerfield Secret? Is there some deadly business connected with the guarding of the Talisman, so dangerous that no one would risk touching it ‘if he knows what he knows’? The old man, if I read him right, isn’t a mystery-monger for the sheer love of it. There never was a less theatrical person; he’s natural all through, and absolutely straight.”