“Very well, madam,” calmed the sergeant.  “So much the better.  They’ll get out of our hands that much quicker.  Just at present it is my duty.”

Errol was standing silent, his eyes averted from the hideous form on the floor, not by word or action betraying a feeling.  The police moved to the door.

Weak and trembling still from the triple shock she had received, Edith Gaines leaned heavily on the arm of her husband, but it was, as nearly as I could make out, only for physical support.

“I told you, Edith, it was a dangerous business,” I heard him mutter.  “Only I never contemplated that they’d carry it this far.  Now you see what such foolishness can lead to.”

Weak though she was, she drew away and flashed a glance at him, resenting his man’s “I-told-you-so” manner.  The last I saw of them in the confusion was as they drove off in the car, still unreconciled.

Kennedy seemed well contented, for the present at least, to allow the police a free hand with Errol and Karatoff.  As for me, Mrs. Gaines and Carita Belleville presented a perplexing problem, but I said nothing, for he was hurrying back now to his laboratory.

At once he drew forth the little tube containing the few drops of tea and emptied a drop or two into a beaker of freshly distilled water as carefully as if the tea had been some elixir of life.  As he was examining the contents of the beaker his face clouded with thought.

“Do you find anything?” I asked, eagerly.

Kennedy shook his head.  “There’s something wrong,” he hazarded.  “Perhaps it’s only fancy, but I am sure that there is something with a slight odor in the tea, something tea-like, but with a more bitter taste, something that would be nauseous if not concealed in the tea.  There’s more than tannin and sugar here.”

“Then you think that some one present placed something in the tea?” I inquired, shuddering at the thought that we had run some unknown danger.

“I can’t just say, without further investigation of this and the other samples I took.”

“Still, you have eliminated that ridiculous dagger theory,” I ventured.

“The police can never appreciate the part it played,” Craig answered, non-committally, laying out various chemicals preparatory to his exhaustive analysis.  “I began to suspect something the moment I noticed that those notes which we all wrote were gone.  When we find out about this tea we may find who took them.  Perhaps the mystery is not such a mystery after all, then.”

There seemed to be nothing that I could do, in the mean time, except to refrain from hindering Kennedy in his investigations, and I decided to leave him at the laboratory while I devoted my time to watching what the police might by chance turn up, even if they should prove to be working on the wrong angle of the case.

I soon found that they were showing energy, if nothing else.  Although it was so soon after the death of Marchant, they had determined that there could not have been anything but rubber on the end of the toy dagger which had excited the doubts of the detective.