Then the memory recurred of the man who had passed him at the door—the man who, he suspected, had forced an entrance to his rooms....
Alison was plucking nervously at the cover without lifting it.
“Why don’t you look?” he demanded, irritated.
“I—I’m afraid,” she said in a broken voice.
Nevertheless, she removed the cover.
For a solid, silent minute both stared, stupefied. The hat they knew so well—the big black hat with its willow plume and buckle of brilliants—had vanished. In its place they saw the tumbled wreckage of what had once been another hat distinctly: wisps of straw dyed purple, fragments of feathers, bits of violet-coloured ribbon and silk which, mixed with wads and shreds of white tissue-paper, filled the box to brimming.
Staff thrust a hand in his pocket and produced the knot of violet ribbon. It matched exactly the torn ribbon in the box.
“So that,” he murmured—“that’s where this came from!”
Alison paid no attention. Of a sudden she began digging furiously in the débris in the box, throwing out its contents by handfuls until she had uncovered the bottom without finding any sign of what she had thought to find. Then she paused, meeting his gaze with one half-wrathful, half-hysterical.
“What does this mean?” she demanded, as if ready to hold him to account.