have been the work of the
same hand. Four months or thereabout after Mrs. Heath's disaster--in
February of this year, in fact--Mrs. Armitage, a young widow, who had been
a school-fellow of my daughter's, stayed with us for a week or so. The
girls don't trouble about the London season, you know, and I have no town
house, so they were glad to have their old friend here for a little in the
dull time. Mrs. Armitage is a very active young lady, and was scarcely in
the house half an hour before she arranged a drive in a pony-cart with
Eva--my daughter--to look up old people in the village that she used to
know before she was married. So they set off in the afternoon, and made
such a round of it that they were late for dinner. Mrs. Armitage had a
small plain gold brooch--not at all valuable, you know; two or three
pounds, I suppose--which she used to pin up a cloak or anything of that
sort. Before she went out she stuck this in the pin-cushion on her
dressing-table, and left a ring--rather a good one, I believe--lying close
by."

"This," asked Hewitt, "was not in the room that Mrs. Heath had occupied, I
take it?"

"No; this was in another part of the building. Well, the brooch
went--taken, evidently, by some one in a deuce of a hurry, for, when Mrs.
Armitage got back to her room, there was the pin-cushion with a little
tear in it, where the brooch had been simply snatched off. But the curious
thing was that the ring--worth a dozen of the brooch--was left where it
had been put. Mrs. Armitage didn't remember whether or not she had locked
the door herself, although she found it locked when she returned; but my
niece, who was indoors all the time, went and tried it once--because she
remembered that a gas-fitter was at work on the landing near by--and found
it safely locked. The gas-fitter, whom we didn't know at the time, but who
since seems to be quite an honest fellow, was ready to swear that nobody
but my niece had been to the door while he was in sight of it--which was
almost all the time. As to the window, the sash-line had broken that very
morning, and Mrs. Armitage had propped open the bottom half about eight or
ten inches with a brush; and, when she returned, that brush, sash, and all
were exactly as she had left them. Now I scarcely need tell _you_ what an
awkward job it must have been for anybody to get noiselessly in at that
unsupported window; and how unlikely he would have been to replace it,
with the brush, exactly