Page:Alice Stuyvesant - The Vanity Box.djvu/262

 in that. All ladies' maids do it, I expect. It was Kate who told me of Lady Hereward's being so fond of her brown silk kind. One day here Kate was trying a new way of doing her hair, after a picture in a fashion book I had, and Poppet—observing little puss!—noticed those lightish, silk-covered hairpins among the common black sort, on my dressing-table."

"No harm, of course," said the detective, consoling Rose, who looked anxious. But he was disturbed in mind. All his calculations trembled like a card-house built too high, at the thought that Kate Craigie might have been secretly in the habit of visiting the View Tower. What if, after all, the evidence against Ian Barr should come to nothing, and the wind of suspicion should veer back to Edward, the footman, lover of Lady Hereward's maid and enemy of Lady Hereward? At best, the evidence against Barr, black as it looked, remained even now entirely circumstantial.

Gaylor had been working industriously up to the point he had reached, and it was partly due to his advice that Barr had been so successfully trapped in France. The late steward of Friars' Moat would be "extradited" back to England in a day or two, and Gaylor had expected to have an almost impregnable case built up against him. It would be a blow to find, just before the arrival of the prisoner, who owed his arrest largely to Gaylor's discoveries as well as suggestions, that the case was not so strong after all.