"Yes. I never called it by the hardest name, myself; but it was seven thirty Wednesday evening that Henry Craven got his death-blow somehow. Well, Walter Cazalet left Charing Cross again by the nine o'clock that night, and was back aboard the _Kaiser Fritz_ on Friday morning--full of his friends in Rome who didn't exist!"
The note-book was put away with every symptom of relief.
"I suppose you can prove what you say?" said Blanche in a voice as dull as her unseeing eyes.
"I have men to swear to him--ticket-collectors, conductors, waiters on the restaurant-car--all up and down the line. I went over the same ground on the same trains, so that was simple. I can also produce the barber who claims to have taken off his beard in Paris, where he put in hours Thursday morning."
Blanche looked up suddenly, not at Toye, but past him toward an overladen side-table against the wall. It was there that Cazalet's photograph had stood among many others; until this morning she had never missed it, for she seemed hardly to have been in her room all the week; but she had been wondering who had removed it, whether Cazalet himself (who had spoken of doing so, she now knew why), or Martha (whom she would not question about it) in a fit of ungovernable disapproval. And now there was the photograph back in its place, leather frame and all!
"I know what you did," said Blanche. "You took that photograph with you--the one on that table--and had him identified by it!"
Yet she stated the fact, for his bowed head admitted it to be one, as nothing but a fact, in the same dull voice of apathetic acquiescence in an act of which the man himself was ashamed. She could see him wondering at her; she even wondered at herself. Yet if all this were true, what matter how the truth had come to light?
"It was the night I came down to bid you good-by," he confessed, "and didn't have time to wait. I didn't come down for the photo. I never thought of it till I saw it there. I came down to kind of warn you, Miss Blanche!"
"Against him?" she said, as if there was only one man left in the world.
"Yes--I guess I'd already warned Cazalet that I was starting on his tracks."
And then Blanche just said, "Poor--old--Sweep!" as one talking to herself. And Toye seized upon the words as she had seized on nothing from him.