As to that Mrs. Bates was positive. She had reason to remember, having looked at the clock _à propos_ of the servants' supper. And Furneaux went away from her with eyes in which sparkled a light that some might have called wicked, and all would have called cruel, as when the cat hears a stirring, and crouches at the hole's rim with her soul crowded into an unblinking stare of expectation.
He looked at his watch, took a cab to Waterloo, and while in the vehicle again studied that scrawled "Rosalind" on Osborne's letter to Janoc.
"A trip to Tormouth should throw some light on it," he thought. "If it can be shown that he is actually in love--again--already----" and as he so thought, the cab ran out of St. James's Street into Pall Mall.
"Look! quick! There--in that cab!" hissed a man at that moment to a girl with whom he was lurking in a doorway deep under the shadow of an awning near the corner. "Look!"
The cab dashed out of sight, and the man--Chief Inspector Winter--clapped his hand to his forehead in a spasm of sheer distraction and dismay. The woman with him was the murdered actress's cook, Bertha Seward, the same whom Inspector Clarke had one morning seen in earnest talk with Janoc under the pawnbroker's sign in St. Martin's Lane.
Winter walked away from her, looking on the ground, seeking his lost wits there. Then suddenly he turned and overtook her again.
"And you swear to me, Miss Seward," he said gravely, "that that very man was with your mistress in her flat on the evening of the murder?"
"I would know him anywhere," answered the slight girl, looking up into his face with her oblique Chinese eyes that were always half shut as if shy of light. "I thought to myself at the time what a queer, perky person he was, and what working eyes the little man had, and I wondered who he could be. That's the very man in that cab, I'm positive."
"And when you and Pauline went out to the Exhibition you left him with your mistress, you say?"
"Yes, sir. They were in the drawing-room together; and quarreling, too, for her voice was raised, and she laughed twice in an angry way."
"Quarreling--in French? You didn't catch--?"
Inspector Winter leant his shoulder against the house-wall, and his head slowly sank, and then all at once dropped down with an air of utter abandonment, for Furneaux was his friend--he had looked on Furneaux as a brother.