Ergo, how did it get there?
If you ask yourself the question from the detective standpoint—and that is what you inevitably should do in following out the Nick Carter histories—the logical answer is obvious.
The woman, upon entering the room—upon stepping into it—realizing that she must be prepared for instant action, at once prepared the bottle for instant use; she would do so by removing the stopper, and by pressing a fold of the handkerchief, reënforced by the pad of her thumb, against the uncorked bottle. This to keep the fumes from escaping.
She would be compelled to do all that with one hand by reason of the exigencies of the occasion, and therefore would simply drop the stopper back into the pocket, or it would escape from her grasp and roll upon the floor—a few inches, or a foot or two.
Hence—and this is the important point so laboriously arrived at—the stopper would have been dropped very close to the point where the woman entered the room.
Now, the life-size portrait of J. Cephas Lynne beneath which the stopper was found was nowhere near any door in that room.
It did occupy, frame and all, a space between two of the windows at the north side of the room; a space which extended from the floor nearly to the ceiling, and which was in width between four and five feet; and it was fastened, as such portraits not infrequently are, flat against the wall.
Nick Carter had already determined that there must be a secret entrance to that room from another part of the house, or from the outside, but he had not even begun the search for such a place as yet.
If Madge Babbington had entered the room by one of the doors, had opened the bottle and dropped the stopper at once upon entering, it would have been in the vicinity of one of the doors, according to the argument already advanced, all of which shot through his mind the instant when Patsy indicated the spot where it had been found.
Architecture, ancient and modern, had ever been a favorite study with the detective, as a pastime. The life and employment of the famous priest who created so many of the secret stairways, rooms, passages, and doors in the old castles of England and Scotland had always interested him.