“Kitty, what have you been up to?”

“It was your fault.  You shouldn’t be so mysterious.  Wishing to ascertain your real opinion of Mr. Savage Keith Rickman, I watched Robert as he was bringing in his tea.”

“I hope he was properly attentive.”

“Attentive isn’t the word for it.  He may have felt that my eye was upon him, and so got flustered, but it struck me that he overdid the thing.  He waited on Mr. Rickman as if he positively loved him.  That won’t do, you know.  He’ll be raising fatal hopes in the bosom of the Savage Keith.  Let us hope that Mr. Rickman is not observant.”

“He is, as it happens, excessively observant.”

“So I found out.  I found out all sorts of things.”

“What things?”

“Well, in the first place, that he is conscientious.  He doesn’t waste time.  He writes with one hand while he takes his tea with the other; which of course is very clever of him.  He’s marvellously ambidexterous so long as he doesn’t know you’re looking at him.  Unfortunately, my eye arrested him in the double act.  Lucy, my eye must have some horrible malignant power, for it instantly gave him St. Vitus’s dance.  Have you ever noticed anything peculiar about my eye?”

“What a shame.”

“Yes.  I’m afraid he’ll have to do a little re-copying.”

“Oh, Kitty, why couldn’t you leave the poor thing in peace?”

“There wasn’t any peace to leave him in.  Really, you’d have thought that taking afternoon tea was an offence within the meaning of the Act.  He couldn’t have been more excited if I’d caught him in his bath.  Mr. Rickman suffers from excess of modesty.”

“Mr. Rickman could hardly say the same of you.  You might have had the decency to go away.”

“There wouldn’t have been any decency in going away.  Flight would have argued that I shared the theory of his guilt.  I stayed where I was for two seconds just to reassure him; then I went away—­to the other end of the room.”

“You should have gone away altogether.”

“Why?  The library is big enough for two.  It’s so big that you could take a bath or do a murder at one end without anybody being aware of it at the other.  I went away; I wandered round the bookcases; I even hummed a tune, not so much to show that I was at my ease as to set him at his.”

“In fact, you behaved as like a dreadful young person as you possibly could.”

“I thought that would set him at his ease sooner than anything.  I did it on purpose.  I am nothing if not subtle. You would have crushed him with a delicate and ladylike retreat; I left him as happy as he could be, smiling dreamily to himself over the catalogue.”

“And then?”

“Then, I admit, I felt it might be time to go.  But before I went I made another discovery.  You know, Lucia, he really is rather nice to look at.  Adieu, my exclusive one.”

CHAPTER XIX