Puzzle of the Silver Persian by Stuart Palmer Page A

afternoon, and she had fifteen minutes, perhaps, to do what she had come to do. Swiftly and methodically she set to work.
    She went through baggage, both Candida’s and that of the missing girl, with the speed of a customs official and with considerably more neatness. The result—apart from showing her that Rosemary had liked frilly things and that Candida went in for more sensible apparel—was exactly nothing.
    In the rack above Candida’s berth were three books: Swann’s Way, Philip Macdonald’s Escape, and the collected sonnets of Edna St. Vincent Millay. In the rack above Rosemary’s berth were Colette’s Young Woman of Paris and a copy of True Story. A pressed bunch of violets marked a place halfway through the Proust book.
    Miss Withers thumbed through them all. She lifted mattresses, poked behind pictures, and even scrutinized the carpet very thoroughly. Last of all she went through Candida’s pocketbook, finding only a packet of brown cigarettes, some silver and bills, and a pocket lighter.
    Nowhere within that stateroom, she could have sworn, were the pages torn from Rosemary Fraser’s diary. Feeling considerable prickings of conscience, Miss Withers replaced everything exactly as she had found it, stepped out, and locked the door behind her. She looked at her watch. It was sixteen minutes past two.
    As she came down the corridor, hurrying a little, she saw a door open. Steam floated out, and then Candida Noring, in a brown bathrobe, came toward the school teacher.
    Her dark hair hung stringily on her tanned forehead, and she looked both tired and ill.
    “Heavens, child,” Miss Withers accosted her. “You’d better let the doctor give you a sleeping potion. You look worn to nothing.”
    Candida stopped. “Do I? I haven’t been to bed, for I know I shan’t sleep.”
    “Nonsense!” Miss Withers patted her shoulder. “Don’t feel that you have all the responsibility. Tomorrow night or Monday morning we’ll be in the Thames, and Scotland Yard will soon straighten out the mystery. They’ll know how to—”
    “Scotland Yard?” Candida’s eyes widened. “I didn’t know—”
    “The purser says that they always handle the formalities in case of a death at sea,” Miss Withers told her.
    “Thank heavens for that,” said Candida, with real relief in her voice. “Now all I have to worry about is just what I shall have to cable to Rosemary’s people. I believe I will go down and let the doctor give me something…”
    She hurried on, and Miss Withers sought her own stateroom. She lay down, intending to rest while she let her mind occupy itself with the intriguing puzzle of the missing pages of the diary. In a few moments she slept, so soundly that she heard nothing of the bitter family quarrel in the next stateroom—nothing of Loulu Hammond’s soprano monosyllables and Tom Hammond’s gruff bewildered phrases. Not even the shrill, joyful participation of the fat-faced Gerald could waken the weary school teacher this afternoon. She slept through dinner, wakened late in the evening, when the steward brought her soup and toast, and wandered for a short while through the oddly deserted ship. No one felt like dancing or bridge that night. The bar closed for lack of trade at ten o’clock, and there was no light beneath the doctor’s door.
    On deck she saw Tom Hammond sucking on an empty brown pipe and thinking his own thoughts as he strode endlessly up and down. A light fog drifted wetly against her face, and on the bridge she could dimly make out that Captain Everett had no less than two officers beside him as his hushed and saddened ship rolled smoothly on toward Land’s End and the Lizard.
    It was a hush which somehow lingered through the next day, in spite of vague efforts on the part of some of the older passengers to hold hymn-singing services on the Sabbath morning. The sound of the distant voices came faintly to Miss Withers in her cabin. They finished, as always on shipboard, with