Her door closed softly.

Lanyard shook his head as if to dissipate a swarm of annoying thoughts,
and went back into his own bed-chamber.

He was quite content with the explanation the girl had given, but being
the slave of a methodical and pertinacious habit of mind, spent five
busy minutes examining his room and all that it contained with a
perseverance that would have done credit to a Frenchman searching for a
mislaid sou.

If pressed, he would have been put to it to name what he sought or
thought to find. What he did find was that nothing had been tampered
with and nothing more--not even so much as a dainty, lace-trimmed wisp
of sheer linen bearing the lady's monogram and exhaling a faint but
individual perfume.

Which, when he came to consider it, seemed hardly playing the game by
the book.

As for Roddy, Lanyard wasted several minutes, off and on, listening
attentively at the communicating door; but if the detective had stopped
snoring, his respiration was loud enough in that quiet hour, a sound of
harsh monotony.

True, that proved nothing; but Lanyard, after the fiasco of his first
attempt to catch his enemy awake, was no more disposed to be
hypercritical; he had his fill of being ingenious and profound. And
when presently he again left Troyon's (this time without troubling the
repose of the concierge) it was with the reflection that, if Roddy were