“Why, you know who I mean,” answered the girl, with surprise, as it did not of course occur to her that a number of young women had been asked to follow strange gentlemen about the streets that very evening. “You know who it was—the foreign gentleman, you know.”
The Inspector burst into a hearty laugh at this, but said sharply to his subordinate: “Bellows, if you laugh again, I’ll report you. No, miss, I really can’t say as I do know just who you mean. You see, we has such a lot of foreign gents to look after one way or another, that we gets ’em sort o’ mixed like, sometimes, you know. Who was your particular foreign gent and why did he walk so fast and why was you so keen to catch ’im?”
“This is very strange,” replied the girl, beginning to think that, after all, she had been played upon by that horrid, suave thief. “Mr. Ferret told me to come here and tell you all about it, you know. At Mr. Maxwell Fair’s, you know—Carlton House Terrace—please say you understand.”
“Ah, I see,” exclaimed Sharpe, at once showing the keenest interest and bristling with alert readiness both to hear and to act. “It’s Ferret, is it? Bellows, go and ask Ferret to come here.” The constable departed to do as he was bid in spite of a gesture of protest from Miss Mettleby and her statement that Mr. Ferret was not here but at Mr. Fair’s house.
“Now, miss,” began the Inspector, when Bellows closed the door after him, “how do you come to be interested in this Spanish conspiracy? It was Señor Mendes that you followed, eh? Why? Speak out, now, plain and square. It’s an ugly business for the likes of you to get mixed up in.”
Miss Mettleby heard all this with a rapidly deepening feeling of guilty complicity in some dark plot, and yet, beneath this sickening dread, she felt a vague hope that now she would glean some intelligent idea of the mystery into which she, Mr. Fair—all her world, had been so suddenly plunged by the hurrying events of the past two hours.
“Oh, you see, sir,” she began; “I assure you that I know absolutely nothing at all about what Mr. Ferret was about—nothing. I am the governess in Mr. Fair’s family, that’s all. And this evening when the family were at dinner Mr. Ferret came into the library—nearly frightening me to death—and told me that a foreign gentleman was in our house who intended some sort of mischief to my kind employer. So he asked me to watch the street door and to follow the man if he should go out before Mr. Ferret returned from telegraphing or something. And, of course, the whole thing is non——”
Her pitiful little plot to divert police suspicion from her knight until the horrible evidence of someone’s guilt—not his, not his!—could be removed was nipped at this point by the entrance, to her unspeakable surprise, of Ferret himself, smiling and unruffled.
“Ferret, do you know this young lady?” asked the inspector perfunctorily.
“Yes, sir,” replied Ferret, with a salute—military to his chief and cavalier to the trembling Kate. “She’s the governess, sir, at Mr. Maxwell Fair’s. How are you again, miss? You are here rather earlier than I looked for you. She’s a regular corker, sir.”