cooped up."

Then he retired, quite pleased with himself.

One would have thought we had exhausted our capacity for emotion, but
Jim said a joyful emotion was so new that we hardly knew how to receive
it. Every one shook hands with every one else, and even the nurse shared
in the excitement and gave Jim the medicine she had prepared for Tom.

Then we all sat down and had some champagne, and while they were waiting
for the police wagon, they gave some to poor McGuirk. He was still quite
shaken from his experience when the dumb-waiter stuck. The wine cheered
him a little, and he told his story, in a voice that was creaky from
disuse, while Tom held my hand under the table.

He had had a dreadful week, he said; he spent his days in a closet in
one of the maids' rooms--the one where we had put Jim. It was Jim waking
out of a nap and declaring that the closet door had moved by itself and
that something had crawled under his bed and out of the door, that had
roused the suspicions of the men in the house--and he slept at night on
the coal in the cellar. He was actually tearful when he rubbed his hand
over his scrubby chin, and said he hadn't had a shave for a week. He
took somebody's razor, he said, but he couldn't get hold of a portable
mirror, and every time he lathered up and stood in front of the glass in
the dining room sideboard, some one came and he had had to run and hide.
He told, too, of his attempts to escape, of the board on the roof, of
the home-made rope, and the hole in the cellar, and he spoke feelingly
of the pearl collar and the struggle he had made to hide it. He said
that for three days it was concealed in the pocket of Jim's old smoking
coat in the studio.

We were all rather sorry for him, but if we had made him uncomfortable,
think of what he had done to us. And for him to tell, as he did later in
court, that if that was high society he would rather be a burglar, and
that we starved him, and that the women had to dress each other because
they had no lady's maids, and that the whole lot of us were in love with
one man, it was downright malicious.

The wagon came for him just as he finished his story, and we all went
to the door. In the vestibule Aunt Selina suddenly remembered something,
and she stepped forward and caught the poor fellow by the arm.

"Young man," she said grimly. "I'll thank you to return what you took
from ME last Tuesday night."

McGuirk stared, then shuddered and turned sudden