Cleek, as the
girl left the room, shutting the door quietly behind her. "So the worthy
Captain is a debtor, is he? H'm. A very uncomfortable state of affairs,
I imagine. And that poor girl has only thrown fuel upon the smouldering
fire, and helped to bank it up. For a man who is dogged by debts would
stoop to a good deal, and if he is already in correspondence with her
stepmother, by way of this little clandestine note, why shouldn't he do
other things? There's a good haul, at any rate, bigger than that for
which many a worse crime has been committed. And, besides, he must have
hated the old man for forbidding him the house. So he might have worked
off a bit of that, too. And yet--gad, it's a puzzler! I'll nip after Mr.
Narkom and have a little talk with _him_! And--no!--I'll see the
laundry-maid first. Perhaps by now she will have remembered something
with regard to that missing handkerchief."

Acting upon that impulse, he rang the bell once more, summoned the maid
to him, and had a little talk with her there in the shaded drawing-room,
and elicited a few facts which surprised him not a little in the
puzzling mesh of conflicting clues which seemed to surround him upon all
sides.

CHAPTER XVIII

ENTER CYRIL

Within the space of a half-hour Miss Duggan was back again in the big
drawing-room, and Cleek, having had a short confidential talk with Mr.
Narkom, and gleaned a few of that good gentleman's ideas, entered the
room by the French windows that led on to the terrace just as she came
in by the hall door.

"Hello!" he said with a smile. "Brought your bootmaker's department with
you, eh? Now we'll really be able to establish somebody's innocence on
_that_! Come, let's have a look at it."

She brought the paper to him, a sort of blank wonderment written in her
eyes as they scanned his face.

"It's the strangest thing," she said with a shake of the head, "the very
strangest! But every single man in this establishment has the same-size
foot, Mr. Deland. There's nothing but tens among them. It seems a queer
coincidence, surely!"

Cleek pursed his lips up to a whistle of amazement.

"Gad! it certainly does. Every man-jack of 'em, then? Jarvis, and
Batchett, and your bailiff Tavish, and McGubbins? Every one of them?"

"What a memory you have!" she countered amazedly. "Yes, every one of
them. Except Mr. Tavish. And his are elevens, he tells me."

"Didn't give away any reason for asking, I hope, Miss Dugga