“Isn’t that rather ridiculous?” gravely asked Doris, from the lofty wisdom of twenty-two years.
“Of course it is. Most real things are. Is it half as ridiculous as for Thaxton Vail to have the stolen Argyle watch in his pocket when it couldn’t possibly be there? Is it?”
“I—I can’t understand that, myself,” confessed Doris. “But—”
“But you know it’s somehow all right? Because you trust Thax. Precisely. Well, I can’t understand how Oz Creede could have committed the robberies when he wasn’t here. But I know he did. Because I distrust him. If it comes down to logic, mine is as good as yours.”
“But,” urged Doris, giving up the unequal struggle, “why should he do such a thing? He is well off. He doesn’t need the things that were stolen. That was your argument to prove Thax didn’t steal them. Besides, with all the horrid things about him, nobody’s ever had reason to doubt that Osmun is as honest as the day.”
“Honest as the day!” scoffed Miss Gregg. “You’re like every one else. You get your similes from books written by people who don’t know any more than you do. ‘Honest as the day?’ Do you know that only four days, out of three hundred and sixty-five, are honest? On the four solstices the time of day agrees absolutely with the sun. And on not one other day of them all. Then a day promises to be lovely and fair, and it lures one out into it in clothes that will run and with no umbrella. Up comes a rain, as soon as one is far enough from home to get nicely caught in it. ‘Honest as the day!’ The average day is an unmitigated swindler! Why—”
The return of Vail and Chase from their task of getting Clive to bed interrupted the homily.
“He seems all right now,” reported Willis. “He’s terribly broken up, though, at having fainted. And he’s as ashamed as if he’d been caught stealing pennies from a blind beggar.”
“He needn’t be,” snapped Miss Gregg. “If I’d had to be Oz Creede’s twin brother as long a time as Clive has, I’d be too inured to feel shame for anything short of burning an orphanage. Just the same, he’s a dear boy, Clive is. I like the way he came to the front, this evening, when—”
“We’ve been clear through the house, from cellar to garret,” announced the chief, from the doorway. “And we’ve been all around it from the outside with flashlights. Not a clue.”