The maid who opened the flat door to Mallett’s ring was young and pretty, but her looks were marred by the expression, a compound of peevishness and indifference, that is to be found on the faces of servants in certain circumstances and in those circumstances only.

“She’s under notice,” was the inspector’s instant reaction. “And she’s worried about it, too. Now what is her worry—her next place, or this week’s wages?”

“Mrs. Eales?” he asked.

“I don’t know whether she can see you. I’m sure,” said the maid. “She isn’t hardly up yet. Is she expecting you?”

“I’m from Scotland Yard,” said Mallett.

“Oh. . . .” A gleam of interest appeared in her eyes. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “I suppose you’d best come in then,” she added with an instant resumption of her pose of unconcern.

With a swish of her skirt that said as plainly as words: “If she has nasty policemen coming after her, it’s no affair of mine, thank goodness!” she led the way to what was evidently the drawing-room.

“I’ll tell her you’re here,” she said, in a tone from which the inspector could guess the relish with which she would announce his identity, and left him.

After the cold cheerlessness of the street, the warmth of Mrs. Eales’s drawing-room was agreeable. It was indeed a warmth that in a very few moments began to produce on Mallett an impression of stuffiness. Somewhere or other, concealed hot-water pipes were trying to dispel the rigours of the outside world and succeeding, he felt, only too well. The windows were closed, and heavy looped curtains shut out so much of the scanty daylight that he would hardly have been able to examine his surroundings without the aid of the electric light which the maid had turned on before she left him.

“H’m,” he said to himself, as he looked around him. “This place would look better by night than by day, I fancy.”

It was a fair-sized room, but the multiplicity of objects in it made it look smaller than in fact it was. The modern craze for blank spaces and clean, spare lines had evidently not affected Mrs. Eales. Nothing was here that was not rounded, soft, stuffed, tasselled, fringed. The carpet which covered the floor from wall to wall was thicker and heavier than any carpet had a right to be, the huge divan was piled with cushions of monstrous size. Everything in the apartment breathed an air of expensive and unsophisticated comfort. From a little heap of illustrated society papers on a side-table it might be deduced that its inhabitant had at some time learned to read.

Mallett sniffed. “No books, of course,” he murmured. “That’s characteristic. And”—he glanced round the walls, “no pictures either. Not so characteristic. I wonder why. . . .”