“Yes.”
“Good!”
“If I am right, however, the outlook is bad—deucedly bad at that.”
“Bad for whom?”
“For the rector, Maybrick—and for Nancy Nordeck herself.”
“Why bad for her?” questioned Chick perplexedly. “I don’t get you. What do you make of it?”
“Listen.” Nick drew forward in his chair. “As sure as you’re a foot high, the veiled woman who visited Maybrick on Tuesday evening was Nancy Nordeck. Her inferior attire, the likeness of this plaster cast to the footprint under the library window, together with all of the other circumstances, convince me that she was the woman.”
“But why, if she went there to visit him, did she look through the library window?”
“To learn whether he was at home and alone. That would have been a perfectly natural step for her to have taken.[Pg 26]”
“True, Nick, as far as that goes,” Chick allowed. “But why on earth did she visit Maybrick? What business can a crook of her class have had with a clergyman?”