"I wish we could talk it over to-day, but, as you see, I'm helpless. Remain in to-night, and I'll come as soon as I can get rid of these confounded people of mine.
"One word more! Be careful! Miss B. is, up to this point, merely puzzled over things. She doesn't suspect her uncle of any crookedness, I'm sure. So we shall have to tread softly where she is concerned.
"I shall see you to-night.—R.H."
Ste. Marie read the closely written pages through twice, and he thought how like his friend it was to take the time and trouble to put what he had learnt into this clear concise form. Another man would have scribbled: "Important facts—tell you all about it to-night," or something of that kind. Hartley must have spent a quarter of an hour over his writing.
Ste. Marie walked up and down the room, with all his strength forcing his brain to quiet reasonable action. Once he said aloud—
"Yes, you're right, of course. Stewart has been at the bottom of it all along." He realised that he had been for some days slowly arriving at that conclusion, and that, since the night before, he had been practically certain of it, though he had not yet found time to put his suspicions into logical order. Hartley's letter had driven the truth concretely home to him, but he would have reached the same truth without it—though that matter of the will was of the greatest importance. It gave him a strong weapon to strike with.
He halted before one of the front windows, and his eyes gazed unseeing across the street into the green shrubbery of the Luxembourg Gardens. The lace curtains had been left by the femme de ménage hanging straight down and not, as usual, looped back at either side, but he could see through them with perfect ease although he could not be seen from outside.
He became aware that a man who was walking slowly up and down a path inside the high iron palings was in some way familiar to him, and his eyes sharpened. The man was very inconspicuously dressed, and looked like almost any other man whom one might pass in the street without taking any notice of him; but Ste. Marie knew that he had seen him often, and he wondered how and where. There was a row of lilac shrubs against the iron palings just inside, and between the palings and the path, but two of the shrubs were dead and leafless, and each time the man passed this spot he came into plain view; each time also he directed an oblique glance towards the house opposite. Presently he turned aside and sat down upon one of the public benches, where he was almost but not quite hidden by the intervening foliage.
Then at last Ste. Marie gave a sudden exclamation and smote his hands together.
"The fellow's a spy!" he cried aloud. "He's watching the house to see when I go out." He began to remember how he had seen the man in the street and in cafés and restaurants, and he remembered that he had once or twice thought it odd but without any second thought of suspicion. So the fellow had been set to spy upon him, watch his goings and comings and report them to—no need of asking to whom!