civil. She carried it off, in her own mind at least, by saying it as if

it were a childish game he was playing. Having received the assurance, he moved from the door and stood opposite her, leaning on the back of a chair.

"Now tell me what happened?" he said.

She told him how she had been waked up just before dawn by the sound of someone moving in her dressing room. At first she had thought it was a window, or a curtain blowing, until she had seen a fine streak of light under the door. Then she had sprung up--to find herself locked in. She had rung her bells, pounded on the door--finally succeeded in rousing the household. The dressing room was empty, but her safe had been opened--her jewels and about five hundred dollars gone--her recent winnings at bridge.

"You've had good luck lately?" he asked.

"Good partners," she answered with one of her illuminating smiles.

She'd gone all over the house after that. Alone? No. Morson had tagged on. Morson was afraid of burglars, having had experience with them in some former place. Besides, she always had a revolver. Oh, yes, she knew how to shoot! She'd gone over the whole house--there wasn't a lock undone.

He questioned her about the servants. Suspicion seemed to point to Evans, who had the run of the safe and might so easily have failed to lock it in the evening when she had put her mistress to bed. Lydia demurred at the idea of Evans' guilt. The girl had been with her for five years.

"I don't really think she has the courage to steal," she said.

"Do you know the circumstances of her life? Anything to make her feel in special need of money just now?" he inquired.

Lydia shook her head.

"I never see how servants spend their wages anyhow," she said. "But what makes me feel quite sure it isn't Evans is that I'm sure she would have confessed to me when I questioned her. Instead of that she's been packing my things for me just as usual."

O'Bannon cut the interview short by announcing that he'd see the sheriff. Lydia had expected--"dreaded" was her own word--that he would say something about the incidents of their last meeting. But he didn't. He left the room, saying as he went: "You'll wait here until I've had a talk with the girl."

His tone had a rising inflection of a question in it, but to Lydia it sounded like an order. She had had every intention of waiting, but now she began to contemplate the possibility of leaving at once. The car was at the door and her bags were on the car. How it would annoy him, she thought, if when he came back, instead of finding her patiently waiting to be civil, he learned that she had motored away, as much as to say: "It's your duty as an officer of the law to find my jewels, but it isn't my duty to be grateful to you."

Presently Miss Bennett and the sheriff came in together, talking--at least the sheriff was talking.

"It looks like it was her all right," he was saying, "and if so he'll get a confession out of her. That's why I sent for him. He's a great feller for getting folks to confess." Then with natural courtesy he turned to Lydia. "I was just saying to your friend, Miss Thorne, that O'Bannon's great on getting confessions."

"Really?" said Lydia. "I wonder why."

"Well," said the sheriff, ignoring the note of doubt in her wonder, "most criminals want to confess. It's a lonely thing--to have a secret and the whole world against you. He plays on that. And between you and I, Miss Thorne, there's some of this so-called psychology in it. You see, I prepare the way for him--telling how he always does get a confession, and how a confession last time saved the defendant from the chair, and a lot of stuff like that, and then he comes along, and I guess there's a little hypnotism in it too. Did you ever notice his eyes?"

"I noticed that he has them," answered Lydia.

Miss Bennett said that she had noticed them at once, as soon as he came into the room. Perhaps it was remembrance of them that made her add, "He won't be too hard on the poor girl, will he?"

"No, ma'am, he won't be hard at all," said the sheriff. "He'll just talk with her ten or fifteen minutes, and then she'll want to tell him the truth. I couldn't say how it's done."

Lydia suddenly stamped her foot.

"She's a fool if she does!" she said, biting into her words.

So this young man went in for being a woman tamer, did he?--the mistress downstairs ordered to be civil and the maid upstairs ordered to confess. If she had time, she thought, it would amuse her to show him that things did not run so smoothly as that. She almost wished that Evans wouldn't confess. It would be worth losing her jewels to see his face when he came down to announce his failure.

Steps overhead, the door opened, a voice called, "Sheriff, get your men up here, will you?"

The sheriff's face lit up.

"Didn't I tell you?" he said. "He's done it!" He hurried out of the room.

When, a few minutes later, the district attorney came down he found Miss Bennett alone. He looked about quickly.

"Where's Miss Thorne?" he said.

Miss Bennett had not wanted Lydia to go--she had urged her not to. What difference did the Emmonses make in comparison with the jewels? But now she sprang to her defense.

"She was forced to go. She had a train to catch--a long-standing engagement. She was so sorry. She left all sorts of messages." This was not, strictly speaking, true.

O'Bannon smiled slightly.

"She does not seem to take much interest in the recovery of her jewels," he said.

"She has every confidence in you," said Miss Bennett flatteringly.

Miss Bennett herself had. Never, she thought, had she seen a man who inspired her with a more comfortable sense of leadership. She saw he was not pleased at Lydia's sudden departure.

He was not. He was furious at her. His feelings about her had flickered up and down like a flame. The vision of her going over her house alone, her hair down her back and a revolver in her hand, alone--except for Morson tagging on behind--moved him with a sense of her courage; and not only her courage but her lack of self-consciousness about it. She had spoken as if anyone would have done the same. Her hardness toward the criminal had repelled him, and when he went upstairs to interview Evans a new sensation waited for him.

The robbery had not released Evans from her regular duties. She had just finished packing Lydia's things for the visit to the Emmonses, and the bedroom where she had been detained had the disheveled look of a room which had just been packed and dressed in. The bed had not been made, though its pink silk cover had been smoothed over it to allow for the folding of dresses on it. Lydia's slippers--pink mules with an edging of fur--were kicked off beside it. Long trails of tissue paper were on the floor. O'Bannon saw it all with an eye trained to observe. He saw the book of verses on the table beside her bed, the picture of the good-looking young man on her dressing table. He smelled in the air the perfume of violets, a scent which his sense remembered as having lingered in her hair. All this he took in almost before he saw the pale, black-clad criminal standing vacantly in the midst of the disorder.

"Sit down," he said.

He spoke neither kindly nor commandingly, but as if to speak were the same thing as to accomplish. Evans sat down.

It was a curious picture of Lydia that emerged from the story she finally told him--a figure kind and generous and careless and cruel, and, it seemed to him above everything else, stupid, blind about life, the lives of those about her.

Evans had a lover, a young English footman who had served a term for stealing and just lately got out with an advanced case of tuberculosis. Evans, who had remained adamant to temptation when everything was going well with him, fell at the sight of his ill health. She had attempted, lonely and inefficient as she was, to do the trick by herself. It was Lydia's irritation over Evans' regret at the loss of the bracelet that had apparently decided the girl.

"If she was so glad to be relieved of the things I thought I'd help her a bit," she said bitterly.

What seemed to O'Bannon so incomprehensible was that Lydia shouldn't have known that the girl was in some sort of trouble. The sight of the room made him vividly aware of the intimacy of daily detail that any maid has in regard to her mistress--two women, and one going through hell.

He said to Miss Bennett after they had gone downstairs again: "Didn't Miss Thorne suspect that something was going wrong with the girl?"

Miss Bennett liked the district attorney so much that she felt a strong temptation, under the mask of discussing the case, to pour out to him all her troubles--the inevitable troubles of those whose lives were bound up with Lydia's. But her standards of good manners were too rigorous to allow her to yield.

"No, I'm afraid we didn't guess," she answered. "But now that we do know, is there anything we can do for the poor thing?"

"Not just now," he answered. "The case is clear against her. But when it comes to sentencing her you could do something. Anything Miss Thorne said in her favor would be taken into consideration by the judge."

"Tell me just what it is you want her to say," answered Miss Bennett, eager to help.

"It isn't what I want," O'Bannon replied with some irritation. "My duty is to present the case against her for the state. I'm telling what Miss Thorne can do if she feels that there are extenuating circumstances; if, for instance, she thinks that she herself has been careless about her valuables."

"She will, I'm sure," said Miss Bennett with more conviction than she felt, "because, between you and me, Mr. O'Bannon, she is careless. She lost a beautiful little bracelet the other--but when you're as young and lovely and rich as she is----"

She was interrupted by the district attorney's rather curt good-by.

"Do you want to drive back with me, sheriff?"

The sheriff did, and jumping in he murmured as they drove down the road: "She is all that. She's easy to look at all right. She's handsome, and yet not--not what I should call womanly. Look out at the turn. There's a hole as you get into the main road."

"Yes, I know about it," said O'Bannon.