He entered the stateroom, however, and bolted the door, then he sat down on his sofa and examined his fingers and his door key attentively. There was wax sticking to both.
When he had fully digested this fact he wiped and pocketed his key and cast a rather vacant look around the little stateroom. And immediately his eye was arrested by a white object lying on the carpet between the bed and the sofa—a woman’s handkerchief, without crest or initials, but faintly scented.
After he became tired of alternately examining it and sniffing it, he put it in his pocket and began an uneasy tour of his room.
If it had been entered and ransacked, everything had been replaced exactly as he had left it, as well as he could remember. Nothing excepting this handkerchief and the wax on the key indicated intrusion; nothing, apparently, had been disturbed; and yet there was the handkerchief; and there was the wax on the end of his door key.
“Here’s a fine business!” he muttered to himself; and rang for his steward.
The man came—a cockney, dense as his native fog—who maintained that nobody could have entered the 196 stateroom without his knowledge or the knowledge of the stewardess.
“Do you think she’s been in my cabin?”
“No, sir.”
“Call her.”
The stewardess, an alert, intelligent little woman with a trace of West Indian blood in her, denied entering his stateroom. Shown the handkerchief and invited to sniff it, she professed utter ignorance concerning it, assured him that no lady in her section used that perfume, and offered to show it to the stewardesses of other sections on the chance of their identifying the perfume or the handkerchief.