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What had Gertrude left in the billiard-room? What was the significance of the cuff-link, and where was it? When the detective left he enjoined absolute secrecy on everybody in the household. The Greenwood Club promised the same thing, and as there are no Sunday afternoon papers, the murder was not publicly known until Monday.
You suspect what happened to the cuff-link, but you won't tell me. So far, all I am sure of is this: I do not believe Arnold Armstrong was the midnight visitor who so alarmed you by dropping shall we say, a golf-stick? And I believe that when he did come he was admitted by some one in the house. Who knows it may have been Liddy!" I stirred my tea angrily.
"Before I'm through you'll find that this ain't a cuff-link, but a necklace for the neck of that pretty sister of yours. You, with your Socialists and your cuff-buttons, tryin' to keep me from gettin' what I go after. Well, it didn't work! It don't usually, when I go after somethin'. It didn't work, did it?" "No. It didn't work," I admitted.
I actually had to use a cloth-of-gold sandal strap to lace my oxfords, and when I lost a cuff-link I was obliged to make shift with two sides of one of Queen Agothonike's ear-rings that I found in the museum at the palace. And that isn't all," went on the lady, wrong kindling wrong, "what do you do for paper and envelopes? There is not a quire to be found in Med.
I find her very poorly so! I stop with her till past eleven, doing what I can. Then her sister, she comes I can do no more I come away. And I walk through Sussex Square, as my road back to Praed Street and Zillah. But before I am much across Sussex Square, I stop sudden, like that! For what? Because I see a man! That man! Him what drops his cuff-link on my table. Oh, yes!"
"It was a man," I reiterated. And then, because I could think of no other reason for my statement, I told him about the pearl cuff-link. He was intensely interested. "Will you give me the link," he said, when I finished, "or, at least, let me see it? I consider it a most important clue." "Won't the description do?" "Not as well as the original."
Your skin's your own: you can blister it if you like. But this house is not mine, and I don't want a conflagration. Did you ever see this cuff-link before?" No, he never had, he said, but he looked at it oddly. "I picked it up in the hall," I added indifferently. The old man's eyes were shrewd under his bushy eyebrows. "There's strange goin's-on here, Mis' Innes," he said, shaking his head.
I got out the cuff-link and went with it to the pantry. Thomas was wiping silver and the air was heavy with tobacco smoke. I sniffed and looked around, but there was no pipe to be seen. "Thomas," I said, "you have been smoking." "No, ma'm." He was injured innocence itself. "It's on my coat, ma'm. Over at the club the gentlemen " But Thomas did not finish.
There was a "plopp" as though something heavy had dropped into the water. Instinctively I knew it was the object for which we were both searching, and I turned to find the inspector eying me quizzically. "What was that noise?" "What noise?" I asked. "Sounded as though that precious cuff-link of yours had dropped into the water."
Gertrude took one look at the cuff-link, and went as white as the pearls in it; she clutched at the foot of the bed, and stood staring. As for me, I was quite as astonished as she was. "Where did you find it?" she asked finally, with a desperate effort at calm. And while I told her she stood looking out of the window with a look I could not fathom on her face. It was a relief when Mrs.
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