Now upon his musing there suddenly intruded sounds of a muffled altercation.  That is to say, the speakers, who were evidently in the lobby beyond the library door, spoke in low tones, perhaps in deference to the presence of a visitor.  Harley was only mildly interested, but the voices had broken his train of thought, and when presently the door opened to admit a very neat but rather grim-looking old lady he started, then looked across at her with a smile.

Some of the grimness faded from the wrinkled old face, and the housekeeper, for this her appearance proclaimed her to be, bowed in a queer Victorian fashion which suggested that a curtsy might follow.  One did not follow, however.  “I am sure I apologize, sir,” she said.  “Benson did not tell me you had arrived.”

“That’s quite all right,” said Harley, genially.

His smile held a hint of amusement, for in the comprehensive glance which the old lady cast across the library, a glance keen to detect disorder and from which no speck of dust could hope to conceal itself, there remained a trace of that grimness which he had detected at the moment of her entrance.  In short, she was still bristling from a recent encounter.  So much so that detecting something sympathetic in Harley’s smile she availed herself of the presence of a badly arranged vase of flowers to linger and to air her grievances.

“Servants in these times,” she informed him, her fingers busily rearranging the blooms, “are not what servants were in my young days.”

“Unfortunately, that is so,” Harley agreed.

The old lady tossed her head.  “I do my best,” she continued, “but that girl would not have stayed in the house for one week if I had had my way.  Miss Phil is altogether too soft-hearted.  Thank goodness, she goes to-morrow, though.”

“You don’t refer to Miss Phil?” said Harley, intentionally misunderstanding.

“Gracious goodness, no!” exclaimed the housekeeper, and laughed with simple glee at the joke.  “I mean Jones, the new parlourmaid.  When I say new, they are all new, for none of them stay longer than three months.”

“Indeed,” smiled Harley, who perceived that the old lady was something of a martinet.

“Indeed, they don’t.  Think they are ladies nowadays.  Four hours off has that girl had to-day, although she was out on Wednesday.  Then she has the impudence to allow someone to ring her up here at the house; and finally I discover her upsetting the table after Benson had laid it and after I had rearranged it.”

She glanced indignantly in the direction of the lobby.  “Perhaps one day,” she concluded, pathetically, as she walked slowly from the room, “we shall find a parlourmaid who is a parlourmaid.  Good evening, sir.”

“Good evening,” said Harley, quietly amused to be made the recipient of these domestic confidences.

He continued to smile for some time after the door had been closed.  His former train of ideas was utterly destroyed, but for this he was not ungrateful to the housekeeper, since the outstanding disadvantage of that strange gift resembling prescience was that it sometimes blunted the purely analytical part of his mind when this should have been at its keenest.  He was now prepared to listen to what Sir Charles had to say and to judge impartially of its evidential value.