Under the board on which it stood lay a thin, fancy-paper covered blotting book. She opened it, to find between its leaves some sheets of thin, foreign-looking paper....
Shaking with excitement and suspense, she took up the top sheet and held it up between her eyes and the window. Then, still with the sheet of paper in her hand, she rushed up the ladder-like staircase, turned into her large bare garret, opened the attaché case where she kept a few things under lock and key, and took out the facsimile of the first of the anonymous letters which had been given to her by James Kentworthy.
Yes, there could be no doubt about it, the watermarks were the same.
She sank down on her bed, dizzy with conflicting feelings. Then Lucy Warren had been right in her reluctantly expressed suspicion! It was now certain that Agatha Cheale had written the anonymous letters which had ultimately caused Harry Garlett’s arrest on the awful charge of poisoning his wife, and with a feeling of mingled excitement, horror, and triumph, Jean Bower faced what seemed to her the certainty of Agatha Cheale’s guilt.
As she came back into the kitchen Mrs. Lightfoot looked up.
“Why, child, you do look bad!” she exclaimed. “I was going to ask you to go hout and get a quarter of a pound of butter, but I declare I’ll do it myself! I don’t want you laid up!”
She put her podgy hand on the girl’s shoulder, and Jean burst into tears and began to sob bitterly, “I’m all right,” she said.
At eight o’clock Jean summoned up courage to ask leave to go out. She felt she must see Sir Harold Anstey to-night. Considering the importance of what she had to tell him, to show him, he could not object to her going to his private address; a flat in Park Lane.
“I want to go out this evening on some urgent business. I hope you won’t mind, Mrs. Lightfoot? Would you lend me a latchkey?”
Mrs. Lightfoot looked consideringly at the girl.