He turned to the servant who stood waiting beside the steps.
“Have you got the remains of the broken lamp there?
“You can go now,” he added. “We shan’t need you further.”
When he had received the smashed lamp, he examined it.
“Not much to be made out of that,” he admitted. “It’s been one of these thousand candle-power gas-filled things; and there’s practically nothing left of it but the metal base and a few splinters of glass sticking to it.”
He looked up at the fresh lamp hanging above them.
“It’s thirty feet or so above the floor. Nothing short of a fishing-rod would reach it. Evidently they didn’t smash it by hand.”
He stooped down and sorted out one or two small fragments of glass from the debris at his feet.
“These are more bits of the lamp, Joan,” he said, holding them out for her to look at. “You see the curve of the glass; and you’ll notice that the whole affair seems to have been smashed almost to smithereens. There doesn’t seem to be a decent-sized fragment in the whole lot.”
He turned to the keeper.