“A platitude—and not yet discredited?”
She gave a little laugh. “I mean the one about boxing up truth. You can hammer down board after board, but the truth is like smoke: it always finds a new chink in the cover to escape from. Don’t you see”—she gave a smothered laugh—“the moment you began keeping your archæological cat in the bag, you had to use all kinds of devices of wire and rope to keep it there, and more often than not it was you and not the cat who was tangled!”
I looked at her in comic dismay. “Well! If you’ve found that out from the diary you must be a perfect demon of ratiocination!”
“Hardly; it was obvious. For instance, when Mr. Salt offered you his suggestions for finding the oratory, you felt obliged to skid all around the truth that you already knew where it was. You even said that finding it seemed ‘superfluous.’ That was rather neat, I thought.”
I grinned. “So do I. As a fact, I followed his route to the oratory to-day. And now I have a gleam in my prophetic soul that you found discrepancies in the rainbow section of the diary.”
She weighed her answer. “Well, I don’t know. I saw the discrepancies readily enough. You never were on Whimble all that afternoon, were you, in spite of the suggestions you scattered to that effect? I always thought archæologists were profound people, but I had no idea they were so sly.”
I mused. “Hm. You are perfectly right. ‘I headed straight for Whimble. . . .’ ”
“Yes, and afterward, ‘It would take me some time to get from where I was to the edge of Mynydd Tarw.’ That was so, no doubt, but I’d bet a—a lot that you were on Mynydd Tarw all the while.”
“Naturally, but I wasn’t going to say so, when the oratory was under the edge of that particular hill. Yes, you’re right: my secret entailed quite a number of peccadilloes.”
I saw her smiling at me. “They became quite inveterate, didn’t they? But the whole thing goes back to the platitude. Squeeze the truth in one place and it sticks out in another. Because you would have the secret of the oratory all to yourself, you had to conceal the innocent fact that you accidentally left a book there.”