“We handled everything.”

“Did you go through these pamphlets?”

“We shook open each one.  We were especially particular here, since it was at this table I saw Mrs. Quintard stop.”

“With head level or drooped?”

“Drooped.”

“Like one looking down, rather than up, or around?”

“Yes.  A ray of red light shone on her sleeve.  It seemed to me the sleeve moved as though she were reaching out.”

“Will you try to stand as she did and as nearly in the same place as possible?”

Hetty glanced down at the table edge, marked where the gules dominated the blue and green, and moved to that spot, and paused with her head sinking slowly towards her breast.

“Very good,” exclaimed Violet.  “But the moon was probably in a very different position from what the sun is now.”

“You are right; it was higher up; I chanced to notice it.”

“Let me come,” said Violet.

Hetty moved, and Violet took her place but in a spot a step or two farther front.  This brought her very near to the centre of the table.  Hanging her head, just as Hetty had done, she reached out her right hand.

“Have you looked under this blotter?” she asked, pointing towards the pad she touched.  “I mean, between the blotter and the frame which holds it?”

“I certainly did,” answered Hetty, with some pride.

Violet remained staring down.  “Then you took off everything that was lying on it?”

“Oh, yes.”

Violet continued to stare down at the blotter.  Then impetuously: 

“Put them back in their accustomed places.”

Hetty obeyed.

Violet continued to look at them, then slowly stretched out her hand, but soon let it fall again with an air of discouragement.  Certainly the missing document was not in the ink-pot or the mucilage bottle.  Yet something made her stoop again over the pad and subject it to the closest scrutiny.

“If only nothing had been touched!” she inwardly sighed.  But she let no sign of her discontent escape her lips, simply exclaiming as she glanced up at the towering spaces overhead:  “The books! the books!  Nothing remains but for you to call up all the servants, or get men from the outside and, beginning at one end—­ I should say the upper one—­take down every book standing within reach of a woman of Mrs. Quintard’s height.”

“Hear first what Mrs. Quintard has to say about that,” interrupted the woman as that lady entered in a flutter of emotion springing from more than one cause.

“The young lady thinks that we should remove the books,” Hetty observed, as her mistress’s eye wandered to hers from Violet’s abstracted countenance.