Miss Letitia changed her glasses deliberately, and took a comprehensive survey of the things on the floor.
"Where did you get 'em?" she said, fixing Heppie with an awful eye.
"I found 'em stuffed under the blankets in the chest of drawers in the attic," Heppie shouted at her. "If we'd washed blankets last week, as I wanted to--"
"Shut up!" Miss Letitia said shortly, and Heppie's thin lips closed with a snap. "Now then, Knox, what do you make of that?"
"If that's the nightgown she was wearing the night she disappeared, I think it shows one thing very clearly, Miss Maitland. She was not abducted, and she knew perfectly well what she was about. None of her clothes was missing, and that threw us off the track; but look at this new glove! She may have had new things to put on and left the old. The map--well, she was going somewhere, with a definite purpose. When we find out what took her away, we will find her."
"She didn't go unexpectedly--that is, she was prepared for whatever it was."
"I don't believe a word of it," the old lady burst out. "She didn't have a secret; she was the kind that couldn't keep a secret. She wasn't responsible, I tell you; she was extravagant. Look at that glove! And she had three pairs half worn in her bureau."
"Miss Maitland," I asked suddenly, "did you ever hear of eleven twenty-two?"
"Just the number, eleven twenty-two," I repeated. "Does it mean anything to you? Has it any significance?"
"I should say it has," she retorted. "In the last ten years the Colored Orphans' Home has cared for, fed, clothed, and pampered exactly eleven hundred and twenty-two colored children, of every condition of shape and misshape, brains and no brains."
"Eleven twenty-two? Twice eleven is twenty-two, if that's any help. No, I can't think of anything. I loaned Allan Fleming a thousand dollars once; I guess my mind was failing. It would be about eleven twenty-two by this time."
Neither of which explanations sufficed for the little scrap found in Miss Jane's room. What connection, if any, had it with her flight? Where was she now. What was eleven twenty-two? And why did Miss Letitia deny that she had lost the pearls, when I already knew that nine of the ten had been sold, who had bought them, and approximately how much he had paid?