"Well, we'll just go and ask Ellen if she can throw any light on the matter, shall we?" said Pamela. "She was the only inmate of this house who was not up in London yesterday."
Ellen was very interested, but it did not seem as if she could help to solve the question. She had certainly not been in the room herself; she had left the house at the same time as they did yesterday, and when she and Millicent Jackson—the friend with whom she had spent the day—had come in to fetch the umbrellas to bring to the station in the evening, they had not been upstairs at all. They had let themselves in at the back door, gone straight through to the hall, taken the umbrellas out of the stand, and gone out of the front door. They weren't in the house five minutes, as they were in a hurry to get to the station in time.
"There, Caroline!" said Isobel. "You see nobody could have been in your room. You must have moved the things yourself."
But Caroline shook her head.
"Could anyone have slipped in the back door after you—without you noticing?" she asked Ellen.
"Oh, miss! Well—I never thought of that!" said Ellen, then hesitated. "Of course, they could have, Miss Caroline—but it's most unlikely. If anyone had troubled to do that they would have taken something while they were about it, wouldn't they?"
Caroline shrugged her shoulders.
"All I know is—the things in my room were disturbed," she insisted doggedly. "And I don't like it."
"How could anyone have slipped in without you seeing, Ellen?" inquired Pamela.
"Well, Miss Pamela, to be exact," explained Ellen, "me an' Millicent unlocked the back door and came in, shut the door, and went into the kitchen, where I struck a match and lit the candle that we keep on the dresser here. We didn't bother to light the gas as we was going straight through, and out the front way. Me an' Millicent was talking, interested-like, as we went into the hall, when Millicent says, 'Oh, did you lock the back door again?' And I says, 'Oh, no.' And I went back and locked it.... Then we got the umbrellas and went straight out the front way.... Now, do you think anyone would have got in just in that minute before I locked the back door, Miss Pamela? Now do you, Miss Caroline?"