“I started out with the assumption that the Branfords must have needed money for some reason or other,” said Maloney.  “So I went to the commercial agencies to-day and looked up Branford.  I can’t say he has been prosperous; nobody has been in Wall Street these days, and that’s just the thing that causes an increase in fake burglaries.  Then there is another possibility,” he continued triumphantly.  “I had a man up at the Grattan Inn, and he reports to me that Mrs. Stanford was seen with the actor Jack Delarue last night, I imagine they quarrelled, for she returned alone, much agitated, in a taxi-cab.  Any way you look at it, the clues are promising—­whether she needed money for Branford’s speculations or for the financing of that rake Delarue.”

Maloney regarded Craig with the air of an expert who could afford to patronise a good amateur—­but after all an amateur.  Kennedy said nothing, and of course I took the cue.

“Yes,” agreed Blake, “you see, our original hypothesis was a pretty good one.  Meanwhile, of course, the police are floundering around in a bog of false scents.”

“It would make our case a good deal stronger,” remarked Kennedy quietly, “if we could discover some of the stolen jewellery hidden somewhere by Mrs. Branford herself.”  He said nothing of his own unsuccessful search through the house, but continued:  “What do you suppose she has done with the jewels?  She must have put them somewhere before she got the yeggman to break the safe.  She’d hardly trust them in his hands.  But she might have been foolish enough for that.  Of course it’s another possibility that he really got away with them.  I doubt if she has them at Grattan Inn, or even if she would personally put them in a safe deposit vault.  Perhaps Delarue figures in that end of it.  We must let no stone go unturned.”

“That’s right,” meditated Maloney, apparently turning something over in his mind as if it were a new idea.  “If we only had some evidence, even part of the jewels that she had hidden, it would clinch the case.  That’s a good idea, Kennedy.”

Craig said nothing, but I could see, or fancied I saw, that he was gratified at the thought that he had started Maloney off on another trail, leaving us to follow ours unhampered.  The interview with Blake was soon over, and as we left I looked inquiringly at Craig.

“I want to see Mrs. Branford again,” he said.  “I think we can do better alone today than we did last night.”

I must say I half expected that she would refuse to see us and was quite surprised when the page returned with the request that we go up to her suite.  It was evident that her attitude toward us was very different from that of the first interview.  Whether she was ruffled by the official presence of Blake or the officious presence of Maloney, she was at least politely tolerant of us.  Or was it that she at last began to realise that the toils were closing about her and that things began to look unmistakably black?