Mr. Jamieson gave an exclamation of disgust.
“Gone!” he said. “Confound such careless work! I might have known.”
It was true enough. We got the lights on finally and looked all through the three rooms that constituted this wing of the basement. Everything was quiet and empty. An explanation of how the fugitive had escaped injury was found in a heaped-up basket of clothes under the chute. The basket had been overturned, but that was all. Mr. Jamieson examined the windows: one was unlocked, and offered an easy escape. The window or the door? Which way had the fugitive escaped? The door seemed most probable, and I hoped it had been so. I could not have borne, just then, to think that it was my poor Gertrude we had been hounding through the darkness, and yet—I had met Gertrude not far from that very window.
I went up-stairs at last, tired and depressed. Mrs. Watson and Liddy were making tea in the kitchen. In certain walks of life the tea-pot is the refuge in times of stress, trouble or sickness: they give tea to the dying and they put it in the baby’s nursing bottle. Mrs. Watson was fixing a tray to be sent in to me, and when I asked her about Rosie she confirmed her absence.
“She’s not here,” she said; “but I would not think much of that, Miss Innes. Rosie is a pretty young girl, and perhaps she has a sweetheart. It will be a good thing if she has. The maids stay much better when they have something like that to hold them here.”
Gertrude had gone back to her room, and while I was drinking my cup of hot tea, Mr. Jamieson came in.
“We might take up the conversation where we left off an hour and a half ago,” he said. “But before we go on, I want to say this: The person who escaped from the laundry was a woman with a foot of moderate size and well arched. She wore nothing but a stocking on her right foot, and, in spite of the unlocked door, she escaped by the window.”
And again I thought of Gertrude’s sprained ankle. Was it the right or the left?
CHAPTER VIII.
THE OTHER HALF OF THE LINE
“Miss Innes,” the detective began, “what is your opinion of the figure you saw on the east veranda the night you and your maid were in the house alone?”