“Whoever stole it upset the can of red paint and stepped in it.”

“Devilish careless of them.  It must have made the dickens of a mess.  Why don’t people look where they are walking?”

“I suspect this man of shielding the criminal by hiding her shoe in this closet.”

“Oh, it’s not his own shoes that this young man keeps in closets?”

“It is a woman’s shoe, Lord Emsworth.”

“The deuce it is!  Then it was a woman who stole the scarab?  Is that the way you figure it out?  Bless my soul, Baxter, one wonders what women are coming to nowadays.  It’s all this movement, I suppose.  The Vote, and all that—­eh?  I recollect having a chat with the Marquis of Petersfield some time ago.  He is in the Cabinet, and he tells me it is perfectly infernal the way these women carry on.  He said sometimes it got to such a pitch, with them waving banners and presenting petitions, and throwing flour and things at a fellow, that if he saw his own mother coming toward him, with a hand behind her back, he would run like a rabbit.  Told me so himself.”

“So,” said the Efficient Baxter, cutting in on the flow of speech, “what I wish to do is to break open this closet.”

“Eh?  Why?”

“To get the shoe.”

“The shoe? . . .  Ah, yes, I recollect now.  You were telling me.”

“If your lordship has no objection.”

“Objection, my dear fellow?  None in the world.  Why should I have any objection?  Let me see!  What is it you wish to do?”

“This,” said Baxter shortly.

He seized the poker from the fireplace and delivered two rapid blows on the closet door.  The wood was splintered.  A third blow smashed the flimsy lock.  The closet, with any skeletons it might contain, was open for all to view.

It contained a corkscrew, a box of matches, a paper-covered copy of a book entitled “Mary, the Beautiful Mill-Hand,” a bottle of embrocation, a spool of cotton, two pencil-stubs, and other useful and entertaining objects.  It contained, in fact, almost everything except a paint-splashed shoe, and Baxter gazed at the collection in dumb disappointment.

“Are you satisfied now, my dear Baxter,” said the earl, “or is there any more furniture that you would like to break?  You know, this furniture breaking is becoming a positive craze with you, my dear fellow.  You ought to fight against it.  The night before last, I don’t know how many tables broken in the hall; and now this closet.  You will ruin me.  No purse can stand the constant drain.”

Baxter did not reply.  He was still trying to rally from the blow.  A chance remark of Lord Emsworth’s set him off on the trail once more.  Lord Emsworth, having said his say, had dismissed the affair from his mind and begun to potter again.  The course of his pottering had brought him to the fireplace, where a little pile of soot on the fender caught his eye.  He bent down to inspect it.