Simultaneously look crossed look.  Blankness was on every face.

“Let us call the ladies,” suggested one.

It was done, and however great the tension had been before, it was even greater when Miss Digby stepped upon the scene.  But she was not a woman to be shaken from her poise even by a crisis of this importance.  When the dilemma had been presented to her and the full situation grasped, she looked first at Mr. Cornell and then at Mr. Spielhagen, and quietly said: 

“There is but one explanation possible of this matter.  Mr. Spielhagen will excuse me, but he is evidently mistaken in thinking that he saw the lost page among the rest.  The condition into which he was thrown by the unaccustomed drug he had drank, made him liable to hallucinations.  I have not the least doubt he thought he had been studying the formula at the time he dropped off to sleep.  I have every confidence in the gentleman’s candour.  But so have I in that of Mr. Cornell,” she supplemented, with a smile.

An exclamation from Mr. Van Broecklyn and a subdued murmur from all but Mr. Spielhagen testified to the effect of this suggestion, and there is no saying what might have been the result if Mr. Cornell had not hurriedly put in this extraordinary and most unexpected protest: 

“Miss Digby has my gratitude,” said he, “for a confidence which I hope to prove to be deserved.  But I must say this for Mr. Spielhagen.  He was correct in stating that he was engaged in looking over his formula when I stepped into his presence with the glass of cordial.  If you were not in a position to see the hurried way in which his hand instinctively spread itself over the page he was reading, I was; and if that does not seem conclusive to you, then I feel bound to state that in unconsciously following this movement of his, I plainly saw the number written on the top of the page, and that number was—­13.”

A loud exclamation, this time from Spielhagen himself, announced his gratitude and corresponding change of attitude toward the speaker.

“Wherever that damned page has gone,” he protested, advancing towards Cornell with outstretched hand, “you have nothing to do with its disappearance.”

Instantly all constraint fled, and every countenance took on a relieved expression.  But the problem remained.

Suddenly those very words passed some one’s lips, and with their utterance Mr. Upjohn remembered how at an extraordinary crisis in his own life he had been helped and an equally difficult problem settled, by a little lady secretly attached to a private detective agency.  If she could only be found and hurried here before morning, all might yet be well.  He would make the effort.  Such wild schemes sometimes work.  He telephoned to the office and—­

Was there anything else Miss Strange would like to know?

III

Miss Strange, thus appealed to, asked where the gentlemen were now.