With fleet, unsounding steps Cleek moved from that closed door to the open one of the drawing-room, remembering what Ailsa had said of how Mrs. Raynor had dozed over her coffee while they waited for him to come, and of how, after Hamer had carried in his note, the good lady had rallied the girl, and then gone off to bed because, she said, she was sleepy—sleepy at half-past eight o'clock!
Taking into consideration the events of the evening, he had counted upon the possibility of something happening; and the moment he entered that room and looked round him he knew that it had done so.
The butler's evening off; the excitement and distraction occasioned by that screaming police whistle sounding from the grounds and sending all the servants flocking out. These things had conspired to upset the routine of things as they should be in a well-regulated house; and lo! the silver tray and the coffee service and the cups, used and unused alike, had been overlooked, and there they still were, awaiting removal. And beside them stood a liqueur stand with Chartreuse, Benedictine, Crême de Menthe, and a half-dozen tiny Venetian glasses.
Liqueurs with coffee! He went over and looked at the glasses; so much, so very much, depended upon that. If more than one had been used; if Ailsa, too, had taken liqueur—— No, she had not! Only one glass had been used, and Mrs. Raynor had gone to bed!
He rubbed the tip of his finger round the inner side of that one used glass, and put it to his tongue.
The wine and the spirits in the decanters on the table of the dining-room had all tasted alike. This liqueur tasted like them.
He made no comment, wasted no time. The instant he had decided that point he left the room and went back to the hall and to the gardens beyond the entrance.
Ailsa Lorne waited for him at the shrubbery; but it was not to the shrubbery he went! His way lay round the angle of the house, past the path to the ruin, past the windows of the dining-room where a drugged man lay, and on through the darkness, until he stood in the shelter of the trees directly opposite a broad stone terrace, upon which the swinging French window of the library gave.
It was bright with inner light, when first he came in sight of it; but he had barely halted before that light went out—and left it as black as pitch.
But a moment later Cleek drew farther back in the shadow of the trees.