"Now, how can I tell that?" said Furneaux. "I wasn't there, you know."
"Was not the weapon, then, found in the unfortunate woman's flat?"
"No—no weapon."
"Well, but that is excessively odd," she said in a low voice.
"Why so excessively odd?" demanded Furneaux.
"Why? Because—don't you see?—the weapon would be blood-stained—of course; and I should expect that after committing his horrid deed, the murderer would be only too glad to get rid of it, and would leave it——"
"Oh, come, that is hardly a good guess, Miss Prout. I shall never make a lady detective of you. Murderers don't leave their weapons about behind them, for weapons are clews, you see."
He was well aware that if the fact of the discovery of the celt had been published in the papers, Hylda might justly have answered: "But this murderer did leave one of his weapons behind, namely the celt; and it is excessively odd that, since he left one, the smaller one, he did not leave the other, the larger one."
As it was, the girl took thought, and her comment was shrewd enough:
"All murderers do not act in the same way, for some are a world more cunning and alert than others. I say that it is odd that the murderer did not leave behind the weapon that pierced the woman's eye, and I will prove it to you. If the stiletto was stolen from Mr. Osborne—and it really must have been stolen—and if that was the same stiletto that the deed was done with, then, the motive of the thief in stealing it was to kill Mademoiselle de Bercy with it. But why should one steal a weapon to commit a murder? And why should the murderer have chosen Mr. Osborne to steal his weapon from? Obviously, because he wanted to throw the suspicion upon him—in which case he would naturally leave the weapon behind as proof of Mr. Osborne's guilt. Now, then, have I proved my point?"