“A handkerchief. It fell at my feet, and I picked it up before I started to run.”
“It is marked ‘A. P.’ Do you know any one with those initials?”
Those beady eyes of his were fixed on my face, watching my every expression, and I knew that his questions were dictated by some definite purpose.
“Give me time,” I said, affecting to rack my brains in an effort of recollection. “I don’t think,—why, yes—there was Abigail Parkinson, Job Parkinson’s wife,—a most respectable old lady I knew in the States,—the United States of America, you know.”
His eyes glinted ominously, and he brought his fat, bejewelled hand down on the table with a bang.
“You are trifling with me!”
“I’m not!” I assured him, with an excellent assumption of injured innocence. “You asked me if I knew any one with those initials, and I’m telling you.”
“I am not asking you about old women on the other side of the world! Think again! Might not the initials stand for—Anna Petrovna, for instance?”
So he had guessed, after all, who she was!