"Was he alone in the room?"
"Yes; I found him there when I went in, expecting to find John. I dislike the man,—unjustly, perhaps; for he is a poor, half-witted creature, who I dare say scarcely knows right from wrong; and I was angry at seeing him. He must have come in through the window."
A servant entered the room at this moment. He came to say that Mr. Grimstone had been waiting below for some time, and was anxious to see Mr. Bulstrode.
Talbot and John went down-stairs together. They found Mr. Joseph Grimstone sitting at a table in a comfortable room that had lately been sacred to Mrs. Powell, with the shaded lamp drawn close to his elbow, and a greasy little memorandum-book open before him. He was thoughtfully employed making notes in this memorandum-book with a stumpy morsel of lead-pencil—when do these sort of people begin their pencils, and how is it that they always seem to have arrived at the stump?—when the two gentlemen entered.
John Mellish leaned against the mantel-piece, and covered his face with his hand. For any practical purpose, he might as well have been in his own room. He knew nothing of Talbot's reason for this interview with the detective officer. He had no shadowy idea, no growing suspicion shaping itself slowly out of the confusion and obscurity, of the identity of the murderer. He only knew that his Aurora was innocent; that she had indignantly refuted his base suspicion; and that he had seen the truth, radiant as the light of inspiration, shining out of her beautiful face.
Mr. Bulstrode rang, and ordered a bottle of sherry for the delectation of the detective; and then, in a careful and business-like manner, he recited all that he had been able to discover upon the subject of the murder. Joseph Grimstone listened very quietly, following Talbot Bulstrode with a shining track of lead-pencil hieroglyphics over the greasy paper, just as Tom Thumb strewed crumbs of bread in the forest-pathway, with a view to his homeward guidance. The detective only looked up now and then to drink a glass of sherry, and smack his lips with the quiet approval of a connoisseur. When Talbot had told all that he had to tell, Mr. Grimstone thrust the memorandum-book into a very tight breast-pocket, and taking his hat from under the chair upon which he had been seated, prepared to depart.
"If this information about the money is quite correct, sir," he said, "I think I can see my way through the affair; that is, if we can have the numbers of the notes. I can't stir a peg without the numbers of the notes."
Talbot's countenance fell. Here was a death-blow. Was it likely that Aurora, that impetuous and unbusiness-like girl, had taken the numbers of the notes, which, in utter scorn and loathing, she had flung as a last bribe to the man she hated?
"I'll go and make inquiries of Mrs. Mellish," he said; "but I fear it is scarcely likely I shall get the information you want."
He left the room; but five minutes afterwards returned triumphant.