"Then I'll be off. And back again in twenty minutes. And in the meantime, Mr. Deland, you won't—you won't think too hard of my Angus will you? Even if he had done such a terrible thing whatever reason would he have had to do it?"
"Has he any debts, Miss Duggan?"
She laughed a little and shrugged her shoulders. "Heavens, yes! Heaps of them. That was what Father had against him. Father used to say that a poor man should own nothing, because there was little chance of paying it back. But so have I, for the matter of that. Over a hundred pounds—and bridge debts. But it's my only recreation, Mr. Deland, and I can easily pay it back, so that it's nobody else's business, is it? But I wouldn't have Paula know for worlds! She'd make my life misery."
"As she'd make any one's—who stood in her way," thought Cleek, as the girl left the room, shutting the door quietly behind her. "So the worthy Captain is a debtor, is he? H'm. A very uncomfortable state of affairs, I imagine. And that poor girl has only thrown fuel upon the smouldering fire, and helped to bank it up. For a man who is dogged by debts would stoop to a good deal, and if he is already in correspondence with her stepmother, by way of this little clandestine note, why shouldn't he do other things? There's a good haul, at any rate, bigger than that for which many a worse crime has been committed. And, besides, he must have hated the old man for forbidding him the house. So he might have worked off a bit of that, too. And yet—gad, it's a puzzler! I'll nip after Mr. Narkom and have a little talk with him! And—no!—I'll see the laundry-maid first. Perhaps by now she will have remembered something with regard to that missing handkerchief."
Acting upon that impulse, he rang the bell once more, summoned the maid to him, and had a little talk with her there in the shaded drawing-room, and elicited a few facts which surprised him not a little in the puzzling mesh of conflicting clues which seemed to surround him upon all sides.
CHAPTER XVIII
ENTER CYRIL
Within the space of a half-hour Miss Duggan was back again in the big drawing-room, and Cleek, having had a short confidential talk with Mr. Narkom, and gleaned a few of that good gentleman's ideas, entered the room by the French windows that led on to the terrace just as she came in by the hall door.
"Hello!" he said with a smile. "Brought your bootmaker's department with you, eh? Now we'll really be able to establish somebody's innocence on that! Come, let's have a look at it."