Herrick tumbled into his clothes and bought a paper on his way to a very late breakfast at the Pilgrims', where he had a card. In the account of the arrest he himself figured as something between a police decoy and an accomplice in crime, but Christina's midnight sally remained unknown and he breathed freer. Now that she was to be kept out of it, he could but admire the quiet good sense with which the police had gone about their business. While those more closely concerned had dashed and bewildered themselves against their own points of view like blind, flying beetles, the police had simply made haste to ascertain if Nancy Cornish had a lover. She had been engaged to Denny; a recent coolness between them had been common gossip; and, since Nancy's disappearance, their common friend, Christina Hope, had kept aloof from Denny, as though embracing her friend's quarrel or suspecting her friend's sweetheart. It now transpired for the first time that the police had dug further into that evidence of Mrs. Willing's which Ten Euyck's eagerness to turn it against Christina had left undeveloped. Mrs. Willing had heard a man's voice which she did not think to be Ingham's, call out loudly and very clearly, "Ask--" somebody or something the name of which was unfamiliar to her, and which she had forgotten until later events had violently recalled it--"Ask Nancy Cornish."
Herrick did not read any further till he was seated and had given his order to a friendly waiter. There were some men at a table near him; it seemed to him that everybody in the room was talking of the arrest and as a matter of fact most of them were talking of it. He had an uneasy desire to know how Christina appeared in her own world's version. But she remained there the friend of Denny, and of the girl over whom Ingham and Denny must have quarreled. When he looked at the paper again, he read that on the night in question by no less a person than Theodore Bird, Denny had been seen to enter Ingham's apartment!
Yes, the tremulous Theodore, despite his wife's particular instructions that he should keep out of it, had called at headquarters and delivered up the fact that at one o'clock or thereabouts, when he was just on the point of retiring, he had heard what sounded like a ring at his door-bell. But he had opened the door only a crack because the wires between his apartment and Ingham's were apt to get crossed, and, indeed, this was what had happened in the present case. He had seen a man standing there, at Ingham's door; and Theodore, safe behind his crack, his constitution being not entirely devoid of rubber, had taken a good look; had seen Ingham fling wide his door, and the stranger enter. On being asked if he could identify this stranger, he said he was certain of it. Confronted with photographs of a dozen men he had unhesitatingly selected Denny's.