Nothing would happen now until dark, he decided, and, stretching himself upon the bed, he pulled the coverlet over him and slept till a tapping at the door announced the coming of the housemaid with his morning tea. She was a round-faced woman, just past her first youth, with a disagreeable cockney accent and the brusque and familiar manner of one who was an indispensable part of the establishment. Mr. Reeder remembered that the girl had waited on him at dinner.
“Why, sir, you haven’t undressed!” she said.
“I seldom undress,” said Mr. Reeder, sitting up and taking the tea from her. “It is such a waste of time. For no sooner are your clothes off than it is necessary to put them on again.”
She looked at him hard, but he did not smile.
“You’re a detective, ain’t you? Everybody at the cottage knows that you are. What have you come down about?”
Now Mr. Reeder could afford to smile cryptically. There was a suppressed anxiety in the girl’s voice.
“It is not for me, my dear young lady, to disclose your employer’s business.”
“He brought you down? Well, he’s got a nerve!”
Mr. Reeder put his finger to his lips.
“About the candlesticks?”
He nodded.
“He still thinks somebody in the house took them?”
Her face was very red, her eyes snapped angrily. Here was exposed one of the minor scandals of the hotel.
It was not an uninteresting sidelight. For if ever guilt was written on a woman’s face it was on hers. What these candlesticks were and how they disappeared, Mr. Reeder could guess. Petty larceny runs in well-defined channels.
“Well, you can tell him from me—” she began shrilly, and he raised a solemn hand.
“Keep the matter to yourself—regard me as your friend,” he begged.
He was in his lighter moments a most mischievous man, a weakness that few suspected in Mr. J. G. Reeder. Moreover, he wanted badly some inside information about the household, and he had an idea that this infuriated girl who flounced out and slammed the door behind her would supply him with that information. In his most optimistic moments he could not dream that in her raw hands she held the secret of Larmes Keep.
As soon as he came down, Mr. Reeder decided to go to Daver’s office; he was curious to learn the true story of the missing candlesticks. The sound of an angry voice reached him, and as his hand was raised to knock at the door, it was opened by somebody who was holding the handle on the inside, and he heard a woman’s angry voice.
“You’ve treated me shabbily: that’s all I can say to you, Mr. Daver! I’ve been working for you five years and I’ve never said a word about your business to anybody! And now you bring a detective down to spy on me! I won’t be treated as if I was a thief or something! If you think that’s behaving fair and square, after all I’ve done for you, and minding my own business. … Yes, I know I’ve been well paid, but I could get just as much money somewhere else. I’ve got my pride, Mr. Daver, the same as you have, and I think you’ve been very underhand, the way you’ve treated me. I’ll go tonight, don’t you worry!”
The door was flung open and a red-faced girl of twenty-five flounced out and dashed past the eavesdropper, scarcely noticing him in her fury. The door shut behind her; evidently Mr. Daver was in as bad a temper as the girl—a fortunate circumstance, as it proved, and Mr. Reeder decided it might be inadvisable to advertise that he had overheard the whole or part of the conversation.
When he strolled out into the sunlit grounds, of all the people who had been disturbed during the night he was the brightest and showed the least sign of fatigue. He met the Rev. Mr. Dean and the Colonel, who was carrying a golf bag, and they bade him a gruff good morning. The Colonel, he thought, was a little haggard; Mr. Dean gave him a scowl as he passed.
Walking up and down the lawn, he examined the front of the house with a critical eye. The lines of the Keep were very definite: harsh and angular; not even the Tudor windows, which at some remote period had been introduced to its stony face, could disguise its ancient grimness.
Turning an angle of the house, he reached the strip of lawn that faced his own window. Behind the lawn was a mass of rhododendron bushes, which might serve a useful purpose, but which in certain circumstances might also be a danger point.
Immediately beneath his window was an angle of the drawing room, a circumstance that gave him cause for satisfaction. Mr. Reeder’s experience favoured a bedroom that was above a public apartment.
He went back on his tracks and came to the other end of the lawn. Those three windows, brightly curtained, were evidently Mr. Daver’s private suite. Beneath them, the wall was black, the actual stone being obscured by a thick growth of ivy. He wondered what this lightless and doorless space contained.
As he returned to the front of the house he saw Margaret Belman. She was standing in front of the doorway, shading her eyes from the sun, evidently searching her limited landscape for somebody. Seeing him, she came quickly to meet him.
“Oh, there you are!” she said, with a sigh of relief. “I wondered what had happened to you—you didn’t come down to breakfast.”
She looked a little peaked, he thought. Evidently she had not rounded off the night as agreeably as he.
“I haven’t slept since I saw you,” she said, answering his unspoken question. “What happened, Mr. Reeder? Did somebody really try to get into the house—a burglar?”
“I think somebody tried, and I think succeeded,” said Mr. Reeder carefully. “Burglaries happen even in—um—hotels, Miss—um—Margaret. Has Mr. Daver
