Upon the carpet something glistened, and, stooping, she picked it up. It was a woman’s curb chain-bracelet, the thin safety-chain of which was broken.
Could the intruder have been a woman? Had the bracelet fallen from her wrist in her hurried flight? Or had it fallen from the pocket of a burglar who had secured it with some booty from a house in the vicinity?
Ella looked out into the small garden, but the intruder had vanished. Therefore she closed the window, to find that the catch had been broken by the mysterious visitor, and then returned again to her room, where she once more examined the bracelet beneath the light.
“It may give us some clue,” she remarked to herself. “Yet it is of very ordinary pattern, and bears no mark of identification.”
Next day, without telling her father of her midnight discovery, she met Seymour Kennedy by appointment at the theatre, showed him what she had found, and related the whole story.
“Strange!” he exclaimed. “Extraordinary! It must have been a burglar!”
“Or a woman?”
“But why should a woman break into your house?”
“In order to watch me. Perhaps Ortmann or my father may have suspicions,” replied the actress, arranging her hair before the big mirror.
“I hope not, Ella. They are both the most daring and the most unscrupulous men in London.”