There were those few little side issues to think about; issues that had puzzled him, but which did not bear any direct reference to the main theme. He felt that they were explainable without any further personal investigation.
It seemed obvious to him, for example, that the reason why Mrs. Siddons had gone downstairs with her bonnet on, when the sight of O’Brian by the front door had turned her back, was a desire on her part to get in touch with Maizie’s sailor husband and warn him that the crime she thought he had committed had been discovered and that the police were in the house. She had told Mrs. Endicott that she believed that she had seen him loitering about the street during the afternoon. And Mrs. Siddons would never have questioned her own ability to walk right out and find him because, if it so desired, Providence would have prearranged a suitable rendezvous.
… They came from that corner, really: those definitely significant waves of warning, as insistent as the scent that had led him to find the letter from Marge Myles in the desk. But they weren’t a scent, nor were they anything so definite as a letter. They were (the astonishing thought thrilled him disagreeably) Marge Myles —her personality—herself—inimical. … Nonsense, nonsense—the room was empty. …
He forced himself to think of the two little bewilderments that had troubled him in connection with the thoroughly bewildering Roberts. That pregnant look she had given him—what had it really meant, more or less, than an intense urge on her part to erase any spell of fascination which Mrs. Endicott might have cast upon him, and to plant in its place the seeds of suspicion of Roberts’s own sowing. It had been nothing more, really, than that.
Now of greater inconsistency had been Roberts’s suggestion of Hollander as the proper friend to stay with Endicott; for Roberts