She bent forward slightly, still smiling, like a person watching with
bewildered intensity a conjurer’s trick.
“Why—”
“Only your gold-mesh purse was with them—and your diamond bar-pin—and
your rings.”
“Why—who, who on earth could have told you?”
I, too, continued to smile, consciously wondering if I should be as calm
as this in the hour of death.
“Who do you think?”
“It wasn’t Elsie Coningsby?”
“No. She was in the house, but—”
“How did you know that?” She uttered a mystified laugh. “She _was_ there!
It was one of the nights she stayed with me when papa and mamma were down
here superintending some changes before we could move in. But I never
told her anything about it.”
“Why didn’t you—when she was right on the spot?”
“Oh, because.”
The smile disappeared. She stopped looking up at me to turn her eyes
toward the foxgloves and scrub-oak.
“Yes? Because—what?”
“Because I promised—that man—I wouldn’t.”
“Why should you have made him such a promise?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just at the time I was—I was sorry for him.”
“And aren’t you sorry for him still?”
She looked up at me again with one of her bright challenges.
“Look here! Do you know him?”
“Tell me first what I asked you. Aren’t you sorry for him still?”
“I dare say I am. I don’t know.”
“What did you—what did you—think of him at the time?”
“I thought he was—terrible.”
“Terrible—in what way?”
“I don’t know that I can tell you in what way. It was so awful to think
that a man who had had some advantages should have sunk to that. If he’d
been a real burglar—I mean a professional criminal—I should have been
afraid of him; but I shouldn’t have had that sensation of something meant
for better things that had been debased.”
“Didn’t he tell you he was hungry?”
The smile came back—faintly.
“You seem to know all about it, don’t you? It’s the strangest thing I
ever knew. No one in this world could have told you but himself. Yes, he
did say he was hungry; but then, a man who’d been what he must have been
shouldn’t have got into that condition. He’d stolen into our pantry, poor
creature, and drunk the cooking-wine. He told me that—” Without rising,
her figure became alert with a new impulse. “Oh, I see! You do know him.
He was an Englishman. I remember that.”