"The gracious one has no shoes either. Boots and shoes—all have been taken away. Nothing remains except the quilted bedroom slippers the gracious one is wearing. And it is impossible to walk out in bedroom slippers."
"I suppose it is." Lady Hannah yawned. "Well, suppose you go and look for the boots. They may have been carried away by mistake, like——" She wondered afresh what could have become of that transformation coiffure?
"There is no mistake." Trudi announced. "And—the gracious lady forgot her little gun beneath her pillow this morning. That also is missing," volunteered Trudi, who had had her instructions and scrupulously acted up to them.
"My revolver has been stolen?" Lady Hannah sprang from her chair, made rapid search, and was convinced. The Browning revolver had been certainly spirited away.
Red patches burned in her thin little face, and her round black eyes regained some of their lost brightness. Nothing like a spice of excitement for bringing you up to the mark. Just now she had felt positively mouldy, and here she was, herself again.
"Nobody came into the room in the night. I sleep with the key round my neck, and if they had opened the door with another, I should have awakened on the instant. Nobody has been in the room to-day except the Frau Kink"—you will remember that a German drummer's widow would naturally converse in her defunct spouse's native language—"the Frau Kink, with the coffee-tray. She did not come near the bed...." The suddenness and force of the suspicion that shot up in Lady Hannah's mind lifted her up out of her chair, and set her upon her feet. "It must have been you. Was it you?"
She looked hard at Trudi, and Trudi sank upon her bed and dissolved in noisy weeping.
"Ach, the wickedness!" she moaned. "To suspect of such shamelessness a poor young maiden brought up in honesty.... Ach, ach!"
But Lady Hannah went on:
"Yesterday morning, when you were so long in coming back with hot water, and I opened the door and looked out into the passage, I saw you whispering with a little stumpy, pimply man, in a long-tailed black coat and large spectacles. Who is he, and of what were you talking?"