"This lady will remember my calling on Mr. Horbury one evening a few weeks ago," he said. "She saw me with him in that room."
"Certainly!" assented Mrs. Carswell, readily enough. "I remember your lordship calling on Mr. Horbury very well. One night after dinner—your lordship was here an hour or so."
Gabriel Chestermarke opened the door of the dining-room—an old-fashioned apartment which looked out on a garden and orchard at the rear of the house.
"Mrs. Carswell," he said, as they all went in, "has Mr. Horbury a safe in this room, or in any other room? You know what I mean."
But the housekeeper shook her head. There was no safe in the house. There was a plate-chest—there it was, standing in a recess by the sideboard; she had the key of it.
"Open that, at any rate," commanded Gabriel. "It's about as unlikely as anything could be, but we'll leave nothing undone."
There was nothing in the plate-chest but what Gabriel expected to find there. He turned again to the housekeeper.
"Is there anything in this house—cupboard, chest, trunk, anything—in which Mr. Horbury kept valuables?" he asked. "Any place in which he was in the habit of locking up papers, for instance?"
Mrs. Carswell again shook her head. No, she knew of no such place or receptacle. There was Mr. Horbury's desk, but she believed all its drawers were open. Her belief proved to be correct: Gabriel himself opened drawer after drawer, and revealed nothing of consequence. He turned to the Earl with another expressive spreading out of his hands.
"I don't see what more we can do to assist your lordship," he said. "I don't know what more can be done."