The detective bowed, and withdrew. Nan laughed aloud. Jimmy Duryea scowled. Lenore, unsuspecting the byplay that was contained in the sentence Nick Carter had just uttered, smiled encouragingly upon Chick.
But by those words Chick and Nan both understood that they were to keep Jimmy Duryea under surveillance for a time at least, while Nick Carter should occupy himself elsewhere; but what was more to the point, Jimmy understood them, also.
Nick Carter stepped aside, and passed into the house through one of the open French windows; then he disappeared.
He had been quite sincere when he had expressed a desire to see the inside of the rooms that Nan occupied, and he wished to see them at once. He believed that no better opportunity could offer than the one already at hand, and so he took advantage of it.
He had only a vague idea of the plan of the house, judging it from the outside view he had been able to obtain of the mansion when he approached it in the automobile, and from the few words that Nan had uttered regarding the location of her rooms.
He passed through the library, into the hall, and up the wide stairway to the second floor, and so found his way, with comparatively no difficulty, to Nan’s suite of rooms.
The door was open, and he could see that there was no one inside the room into which he peered; Nan’s maid was evidently taking advantage of the evening hour, to gossip with the other servants of the house.
The detective passed inside and closed the door after him. Then he stopped, and began, from that point of vantage immediately inside the closed door, to make a systematic survey of his surroundings.
Nick Carter’s method under such circumstances has been too often described to need repetition here. He stood in that one spot on the floor, and permitted his eyes to travel slowly from floor to ceiling, and back again to floor, carefully covering every inch of space that was before him, with that searching gaze.
There were just three points upon which Nick Carter was certain since that conversation with Jimmy Duryea in the summerhouse; two of them were dependent upon the first one, but Jimmy had as good as stated the first one for a fact.