Sandy loitered at the kitchen door waiting for Miss Brodie to come for a walk by the sea. Miss Brodie was doing something to an enormous ham prior to putting it into a huge pot. Miss Brodie’s new ventures into cookery in no way diminished her previous grandeur, for everything she prepared for Gordon Lowther seemed to be large, whether it was family-sized puddings to last him out the week, or joints of beef or lamb, or great angry-eyed whole salmon.

“I must get this on for Mr. Lowther’s supper,” she said to Sandy, “and see that he gets his supper before I go home tonight.”

She always so far kept up the idea that she went home on these week-end nights and left Mr. Lowther alone in the big house. So far the girls had found no evidence to the contrary, nor were they ever to do so; a little later Miss Ellen Kerr was brought to the headmistress by Miss Gaunt to testify to having found Miss Brodie’s nightdress under a pillow of the double bed on which Mr. Lowther took his sleep. She had found it while changing the linen; it was the pillow on the far side of the bed, nearest the wall, under which the nightdress had been discovered folded neatly.

“How do you know the nightdress was Miss Brodie’s?” demanded Miss Mackay, the sharp-minded woman, who smelt her prey very near and yet saw it very far. She stood with a hand on the back of her chair, bending forward full of ears.

“One must draw one’s own conclusions,” said Miss Gaunt.

“I am addressing Miss Ellen.”

“Yes, one must draw one’s own conclusions,” said Miss Ellen, with her tight-drawn red-veined cheeks looking shiny and flustered. “It was crêpe de Chine.”

“It is non proven,” said Miss Mackay, sitting down to her desk. “Come back to me,” she said, “if you have proof positive. What did you do with the garment? Did you confront Miss Brodie with it?”

“Oh, no, Miss Mackay,” said Miss Ellen.

“You should have confronted her with it. You should have said, ‘Miss Brodie, come here a minute, can you explain this?’ That’s what you should have said. Is the nightdress still there?”

“Oh, no, it’s gone.”

“She’s that brazen,” said Miss Gaunt.

All this was conveyed to Sandy by the headmistress herself at that subsequent time when Sandy looked at her distastefully through her little eyes and, evading the quite crude question which the coarse-faced woman asked her, was moved by various other considerations to betray Miss Brodie.